Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 78

When It Comes To Gun Violence, One Side Has A Very Clear Message. Which Side Is That?

So now while the decision as to who should run the world’s largest corporation gets down to how we feel about locker-room talk, the Gun Violence Prevention (GVP) community, a.k.a. Gun-sense Nation, needs to figure out a post-election strategy that will both enhance its presence among the general public and lead to some genuinely positive and practical reforms regarding guns.

          If it’s over, if it’s really over, sometime following January 20, 2017 there well might be a 5-4 liberal majority on the Court, there well might be a gun bill on its way to her desk; all of a sudden GVP may not be playing catch-up but may actually, for at least a couple of years, be leading the way.  It’s not all that easy to switch gears from ‘I told you so’ to ‘I’m telling you so,’ but a few more videos will make it still more likely, so without giving anything the evil eye, perhaps it’s time for GVP to get to work.

Here’s the problem.  More than 55 million Americans no doubt own automobiles, furniture, clothing, toys, all kinds of detritus of daily consumer life, but they also own guns. Now probably half of these folks own only one gun, and in many cases this gun has been sitting around for years.  And most of the other gun owners have between 2 and 5 weapons, a handgun here, a shotgun and/or a rifle there.

There are also 3-4 million folks who own as many as 100 guns or more, and it’s these folks, gun nuts to the core, whose energies and enthusiasms sustain the pro-gun side of the debate.  And in addition to their love of guns, most of the members of Gun-nut Nation also have a deep and abiding mistrust of the motives and strategies of the other side, read: GVP.

I don’t believe that there is really any ground for compromise or a place ‘in the middle’ where Gun-nut Nation and Gun-sense Nation can meet because the latter is committed to the regulation of gun ownership and the former would be happy if all gun regulations disappeared. But the strength of Gun-nut Nation isn’t just a function of their numbers in a particular state or the country as a whole.  It’s the fact that when it comes to their feelings about guns, they speak with one voice so their message is loud and clear. Guns are an important part of the American heritage, guns keep us free and guns keep us safe. Gun-nut Nation has been repeating this jingle over and over again for the last thirty years and they’ve got it down pat.

I don’t think the messaging is in any way as sharp, as clear or as consistent on the GVP side.  Partly because much of the GVP activity has been reactive so that what comes out is more a response to what Gun-nut Nation is doing than what Gun-sense Nation wants to do. But there’s another problem that goes beyond the manner in which the GVP responds to the lunacies and idiocies of the other side. Which is the that, generally speaking, Gun-nut Nation speaks with one voice, Gun-sense Nation consists of many voices, each of which considers that what it wants needs to be heard.

I’m not trying to disparage or raise doubts about the commitment, energy or determination of any GVP group. And there should always be room in any particular group or grouping of organizations for competing points of view. I’m just saying that GVP has to figure out a way to preserve the independent thought and action of all its member-organizations while, at the same time creating one consistent message that will ring loud and clear. The opportunity may soon present itself for such a message to resonate far and wide. And the result may well be some new regulations that are long overdue. Now where’s the website with all those Howard Stern tapes?

If We Really Want To Understand Gun Violence, Maybe We Should Use The GVA Instead Of The CDC.

Our good friends at the inestimable Gun Violence Archive (GVA) have added a new enhancement to their website which allows users to search the real-time gun violence numbers in every state and every Congressional district within every state.  This is not only a very important search tool, but it also gives the digital (email and twitter) contact information for each Member of Congress so that someone’s concerns about gun violence in their own neighborhood can be sent directly to the federal representatives who might, God willing, get to vote on a gun bill next year. Because if the unthinkable happens and he becomes Number 45, he will immediately call for a national concealed-carry law, but if HRC moves into 1660 Pennsylvania Avenue, she’ll no doubt want to extend background checks on private gun transfers to all 50 states. Hard to figure that one out, isn’t it?

           So being able to check gun violence stats on a daily basis and then being able to send the stats or a comment about the stats, or both, to your elected reps in DC is a very valuable tool for driving the GVP message forward loud and clear.  Good job – well done!

But of course being something of a data-head myself, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a look at the year-to-date stats because I have mentioned on multiple occasions that the numbers generated by GVA seem to be at variance with what we get from the CDC. The CDC numbers cover every type of gun injury, and even though the data often contains coding errors or just plain gaps, if the government pays the CDC to report all injuries in order to evaluate the health of the American population, then either we depend on their numbers or we don’t. But when I looked at the state-level data in this new GVA search engine, I’m not so sure that what we get from the CDC gives us even a rough idea of the real level of gun violence that we suffer every day.

Before comparing GVA and CDC numbers, let’s understand the limitations under which GVA operates no matter how exact they try to be.  GVA is an open-source aggregator, which means that the data comes whichever public sources post information on the web. So GVA is dependent on the various media venues that generate web-based information, which eliminates suicides as well as most unintentional injuries caused by guns or anything else.

In 2014, the most recent year for CDC data, the five states with the highest rates of gun homicides (AL, AR, LA, MS, SC) totaled 1,423 gun deaths; the five states with the lowest rates (CT, MA, NY, RI, VA) recorded 772 gun homicide deaths, together this gets us to 2,195. The GVA count for those same 10 states in 2014 was 2,420, a differential of 10%.  Apply this to the country as a whole and gun homicides would go from 11,409 to 12,500 or so.  Of the 50 state-level totals, the CDC admits that gun homicide numbers from 12 states are exceedingly rough estimates and might not be real.  But of the 10 states whose numbers I counted, only one state’s data – Rhode Island – was too ‘unstable’ to be used.

As I said earlier, we have to assume that the GVA data is probably well below the actual level of gun violence, given the sources on which it is based. I’m not saying the sources are wrong, I’m saying that, by definition, they can’t catch every shooting event. But what we do learn from the GVA’s new search engine is that the number that most of us use to quantify the terrible toll from gun violence is probably much less, at least 10% percent less than it really is. If it were up to me, when it comes to understanding the true degree of gun violence, perhaps we should try to get HRC (assuming there’s good news on November 8th) to substitute the GVA for the CDC.

If Hillary Wins Big, Will There Be A New Gun Bill? I’m Not So Sure.

Lets’ say for the sake of argument that HRC kicks his ass on November 8th.  And she does such a good job of ass-kicking that the Senate turns blue.  And the ass-kicking is so remarkably well done that the House comes within three or four seats of also no longer being red. Now you probably couldn’t have imagined such a scenario just a few short weeks ago, but Trump just keeps saying what he shouldn’t say to the point that the unthinkable is no longer shorthand for a Trump victory next month, but is what some of us are beginning to whisper as regards a blowout victory for HRC.

           And if this does happen, you can bet that one of the first orders of business will be sending a gun bill up to the Hill that has a fairly good chance of getting passed.  And you can further bet that if there is such a bill, that its core provision will be revival of the extension of background checks to downstream transfers and sales, not only because this was the core of the post-Sandy Hook bill which almost made it through the Senate, but it’s an idea which even Gun-nut Nation, or at least some part of the Nation, appears to support.

Last year a CBS/New York Times poll asked the following question: “Do you favor or oppose a federal law requiring background checks on all potential gun buyers?” A whopping 92% said ‘yes.’  And a positive response to this question was even registered by 87% of the poll respondents who identified themselves as Republicans, which for an issue as divisive as gun control, that’s about as near to absolute unanimity as you’re going to get.

Since there’s nothing like voting for a bill which appears to have near-universal support, you might think that after more than twenty years of wrangling over the extent to which gun regulations can be implemented that will keep guns out of the ‘wrong hands,’ that finally some common sense will prevail, the NRA will make an attempt but not too much of an attempt to keep expanded background checks from becoming law of the land and – glory hallelujah – thy will be done. Duh, not so fast.  If you think for one minute that Gun-nut Nation will roll over and play dead, even if a lot of gun nuts are telling pollsters that on the issue of background checks they really don’t care, then you don’t really understand how gun owners think about guns or why the NRA can continue to defeat legislation that even many of its members are willing to let fly.

In 2012 (Sandy Hook happened in December) the NRA collected $107 million in dues.  In 2013, while Washington argued back and forth over extending background checks, revenue from dues shot up to $175 million bucks. The following year when the heat was off, revenue from dues drifted back down to $128 million. So how do you explain the fact that the NRA fought an unyielding battle against extending background checks, virtually all Americans agreed that it was a good idea, and yet dues collected by the NRA went up by a staggering 60%?

I’ll tell you how to explain it.  There is simply a complete disconnect in the brains of gun owners between their ownership of guns and the 115,000+ deaths and injuries which occur each year because of guns.  After all, you can’t buy a gun legally unless you pass a background check, so by definition, with the exception of suicides, law-abiding gun owners rarely shoot themselves or others with their guns. And even though it’s not true, most people believe that if someone wants to commit suicide it will happen, access to a gun or not.

So if the NRA wants to wage an all-out effort to defeat a new gun bill next year, they’ll get the same support from their members that they always get, and that will be the most active support.  Will they also be passively supported by the millions of gun owners who aren’t dues-paying members?  I’ll take the short odds on that one, too.

Of Course Hillary Wants To Make All Women Defenseless. That’s What happens When You Take Away The Guns.

Our good friend Tim Johnson, from Media Matters, has just released a story about the latest NRA advertising blitz which is a what-else-is-new argument about how HRC is going to take away all the guns. In this case the ad is specifically directed at women and starts off with a little spiel from a woman in Indianapolis who shot some guy after he attacked her with a knife. Now she’s a poster-person for Gun-nut Nation because, as she says, women have the ‘right’ to defend themselves with a gun.

            That’s right Kristi (she’s the lady in the ad) you certainly do have the ‘right’ to defend yourself with a gun.  You also have the right to defend yourself by calling 911, running away from the scene, using your fists or just using your mouth.  And while Gun-nut Nation wants you to believe that guns are a much more effective, in fact the only effective way to protect yourself from crime, the truth is that guns don’t, in fact, provide an extra measure of safety against crime.

Now of course Gun-nut Nation members who are reading this column will immediately jump up and say that any such study was no doubt put together by some gun-grabbing group, so it shouldn’t be taken as meaning anything at all.  But in fact, the study which shows that guns don’t provide an extra measure of protection is doesn’t come from the gun-grabbing cabal, it was conducted and published, in fact, by none other than Gary Kleck, whose 1995 study which estimated that gun-carrying civilians prevented 2 ½ million crimes from being committed every year. And this estimate, which has been debunked by just about every serious scholar who has ever bothered to review Kleck’s work, remains the non plus ultra argument within Gun-nut Nation for concealed-carry up to the present day.

Kleck’s study on how victims resist crime compared various self-protection (SP) strategies, including using guns or other weapons, running away, yelling or calling attention to the problem, calling the police or hiding away.  And with many caveats about the difficulty of analyzing this kind of data, Kleck’s conclusion is this: Using a gun to defend against a violent crime appears to be somewhat more useful in preventing injury, but the difference wasn’t “statistically significant.” And complicating the analysis even further was the fact, according to Kleck, that the very limited number of defensive gun uses made it difficult to determine the value of using a gun as a protective strategy at all.

Hey – wait a minute.  I thought that Kleck said there were millions of defensive gun uses every year. And didn’t Mr. Trump say that if someone had brought a gun into the Pulse that the horrible shooting in Orlando wouldn’t have taken place?  Now you would think that when the Grand Master of all defensive gun uses says that he really can’t prove that guns make any real difference in providing protection from crime that maybe, just maybe, Gun-nut Nation would pull back a bit, reconsider one of its most cherished ideas and perhaps, God forbid, admit that their attempt to get everyone to go out and buy a gun is based on nothing other than what they want rather than what really is.

But let’s go back to the issue that provoked this column, namely, Tim Johnson’s report on the new HRC attack ad being mounted by the NRA.  Their main man, Donald Shlump-o, is beginning to fall behind in PA.  All of sudden the great surge in Ohio appears to have come to an end.  The Florida polls don’t look all that great.  These are three big gun states and these are states which if they don’t go red, the main actor in the Fox News reality show known as the Republican Presidential campaign is toast.  So why not push an argument about defensive gun use that has no basis in truth?  Hasn’t this been the Trump-o strategy from Day One?

 

What Do Doctors Tell Their Patients What To Do With Their Guns? No Surprise – It Depends On The Doctor.

A new study by Eitan Hersh and Matthew Goldenberg is making waves both in the medical and wider media because it appears to say what Gun-nut Nation has been saying forever about doctors and guns; namely, that doctors don’t like guns.  And since doctors don’t like guns, according to this line of non-thinking, they shouldn’t talk to their patients about guns.  And if they didn’t talk to their patients about guns, to follow this non-thinking line to its absolute conclusion, there wouldn’t be anything known as ‘gun violence,’ because everyone knows that gun violence is a figment of the CDC’s imagination anyway.

           Okay, let’s get back to reality.  To gather, analyze and understand their data, the authors first created a patient ‘vignette’ which described an initial screening interview between a male or female patient and a primary care provider (PCP.)  During the interview, the patient admits to nine not-atypical health factors (tobacco and alcohol use, depression, etc.) that can cause medical problems, one of them being access to guns.  The roughly 300 physicians who participated in the study were then asked to rate how much they considered each of these health factors to represent medical risk, as well as how they would respond to each one. Their responses were then evaluated based on additional data which matched each respondent with voter registration; a process that was not mentioned to survey respondents so as to avoid the possibility that survey answers would be biased based on how respondents felt their answers might be judged.

To quote the conclusion of the study: “Our findings suggest that Republican and Democratic physicians differently assess the seriousness of patient health issues that are

politically salient. Republican physicians also differ from Democratic physicians in the treatments offered to patients who present with those health issues.” And of the nine issues that comprised the health vignettes, on which particular issue did physicians identified as Republicans versus physicians identified as Democrats differ most widely regarding degree of risk?  You got that one right – access to guns.  Grouped by political affiliation, the two groups more or less agreed on the same degree of risk when it comes to helmets, obesity, tobacco, depression, alcohol and professionally-furnished sex.  Republican-affiliated physicians rated abortion and marijuana use as their greatest concerns, Democratic-affiliated doctors viewed these two issues as having little or no concern at all.  For blue doctors on the other hand, they were most concerned about access to guns, in the case of red doctors gun ownership did not register as a concern.

So far the survey results in terms of the correlation between political affiliations and views about the health risks posed by guns holds no surprise.  After all, most gun owners are Republicans, most gun owners do not consider their guns as a risk to health, so there’s every good chance that many physicians who are affiliated as Republicans will also own guns.  Or at least may share similar views on gun access with their patients who own guns.

Ready?  Here’s the rub.  Recall that the survey not only asked participating doctors to assess the degree of risk, but also asked them to describe a treatment plan for each risk vignette.  And when it comes to firearms, both blue and red doctors would discuss gun risks, but the Democratic-affiliated physicians would counsel patients not to keep firearms, the GOP-affiliated physicians opted for ‘safe storage’ plans.

What this survey reveals is that even though physicians may differ on whether gun ownership poses a health risk, there appears to be across-the-board consensus that patients should be counseled about access to guns.  Where the partisan divide appears is not on the issue of gun-risk per se, but on the most effective strategy for mitigating that risk.  And this is a very important finding because if you listen to Gun-nut Nation, they’ll tell you that guns don’t pose any risk to health at all.  And after all, who really knows more about health – the AMA or the NRA?

We Don’t Need Cops Because We Can All Carry Guns, Right?

Back in the 1970s I lived in Columbia, SC, and while my house was inside the city limits, I could jump in my car and within 5 minutes get to a nice, sand pit on the edge of town. So what I would do was reload a couple of hundred rounds of 9mm or 45-caliber brass, then take either my Browning Hi-Power or my Colt 1911 out to the sand pit and bang away.  I made the bullets by melting down and then casting wheel weights that I could scavenge from any gas station around.  At that time a box of factory, 9mm ammo ran about ten bucks, to shoot 50 reloads probably cost me about 60 cents.

            This was what handgun shooting was all about in the 1970s – you loaded your own ammo, went out to a pit or the woods and banged away.  But that’s all changed now because according to Gun-nut Nation, a handgun is an indispensable ‘tool’ for protecting yourself against violent crime, terrorism, God knows what.  Now the fact that all of those folks who stand in line to get concealed-carry permits will almost never be victims of a violent crime is beside the point.  After all, we know for a fact that voter fraud will get Hillary elected this year, even if there’s no evidence whatsoever that there’s any voting fraud at all.  It’s still a fact!

The same thing holds true when we talk about guns.  It’s now more than 20 years since Gun-nut Nation began touting the idea that gun-toting Americans save us from being crime victims at least several million times every year. Now there must be some truth to this argument because handgun sales continue to go up while violent crime rates continue to go down. Of course the possibility that one trend may have absolutely nothing to do with the other is beside the point.  As a gun instructor was quoted by Angela Stroud in her brilliant book, without a gun she didn’t have a ‘self-defense plan.’

Now I always thought that the way you defended yourself against a possible crime, and in fact this happens to be the way it is usually done, is to open your mouth and scream.  Or maybe dial 911.  Or maybe, God forbid, back down. But what Gun-nut Nation wants you to believe is that none of those strategies compares to the protection afforded by pulling out a gun. And in case you need more proof, the Martians have landed at Area 51.

A new study by Andrew Papachristos and colleagues, based on a study of 911 calls in Milwaukee from 2005, found that inner-city residents appear to share Gun-nut Nation’s aversion to viewing police as the primary defenders against violent crime.  The decline in 911 calls took place after a biracial Milwuakee resident, Frank Jude, was severely beaten by several white, off-duty police officers which eventually led to the firing of nine cops following protests in the black community when the news of the attack got around.  The researchers estimate that more than 20,000 calls were not made because of mistrust of the police following the Jude affair, and when people stop asking the cops to protect them from crime, the crime rates have a funny way of going up.

I’m not saying there aren’t occasions when having access to a gun or some other kind of weapon will make it easier to defend against a crime.  What I am saying is that Gun-nut Nation wants you to think that a gun should always be your first line of defense. After all, the average person walking around with a concealed handgun isn’t usually required to demonstrate any competence in using the weapon or, for that matter, even understanding how to determine whether a particular situation might be life-threatening or not.  But citizen-protectors don’t need any training because, after all, the 2nd Amendment gives them the ‘right’ to walk around with a gun.

They Don’t Have Many Gun Accidents In Tennessee But Lots Of People Keep Getting Shot.

Earlier this year a big hue and cry broke out in Tennessee when the State Health Department issued a report which put the number of accidental shooting deaths for 2014 at the stratospheric level of 105.  This was not only four times higher than the number of unintentional gunshot deaths for any previous year, but accounted for nearly 20% of reported accidental shooting mortality in the United States.

           There’s an organization in Tennessee called Safe Tennessee Project which is ‘dedicated to addressing the epidemic of gun-related injuries and gun violence’ through tracking the rate of shootings, and advocating the standard Gun-sense Nation strategies for reducing gun violence like expanded background checks, strengthening CAP and domestic violence laws, temporary gun removal from persons considered to be threats by family members – the usual nine yards. The group was rightfully alarmed when the 2014 number for accidental gun deaths was made public and their statement lamenting these shootings bounced around various media outlets here and there.

Oops! – one little problem.  Even though Safe Tennessee checked the validity of the data with the Health Department before going public, it turned out that the report was wrong. Two weeks or so after the initial reports about the 105 accidental gun deaths appeared, the State Health Department sent out an advisory which adjusted the 2014 number from 105 down to just five. This was not only the lowest annual total that Tennessee had ever recorded, but was far and away the lowest state-level number for any of the 20 states that sent their unintentional gun-death number to the CDC for 2014.

So what do you think happened?  What happened is what always happens whenever data which is used by Gun-sense Nation to promote its agenda is changed, namely, that Gun-nut Nation immediately told all its members that, once again, the gun grabbers were lying about gun violence in order to justify taking away all the guns.  The NRA called it just another example of how Gun-sense Nation uses ‘suspect data to push their political agenda,’ and of course we all know what the goal of that agenda happens to be.

As usual, the real issue that drives the debate about gun violence was lost in the mea culpa’s and tua culpa’s which followed from what was nothing more than a silly mistake made by some hapless employee at the Tennessee Department of Health. The CDC creates data based on reports that follow a procedure known as ICD-10, developed and administered by the World Health Organization, which allows physicians throughout the entire world to keep track of medical diagnoses in a uniform and comprehensive way. In the case of injuries, they are divided between intentional versus unintentional events, so as to make it easier for public health and law enforcement to ascertain the extent to which the incidence of any particular type of injury is going up or going down.

Although I can understand why we need to differentiate car accidents as unintentional injuries versus aggravated assaults where intentionality is clearly the cause, I have never felt comfortable in dividing gun injuries into these distinct categories for the simple reason that, as opposed to responding to damages from vehicle crashes by designing safer cars, there is no way to make guns ‘safer’ as long as someone points a gun at themselves or someone else and goes – bang!  Because if you haven’t figured this one out yet, let me break it to you gently: guns are designed for one purpose and one purpose only – to propel a solid piece of lead at high speed from me to you.

Tennessee may have a very ‘low’ accidental gun-death rate, but the rate of all gun deaths is 50% higher than the national rate.  Which doesn’t make the efforts of Safe Tennessee in any way irrelevant to health and welfare in the Volunteer State.  To the contrary, they have important work to do, Health Department data screw-ups or not.

Don’t More Guns Equal Less Crime? Not Any More.

What’s going on?  After year-to-year declines in the violent crime rate going back twenty years, all of a sudden in 2015 things turned around and now violent crime rates are going back up.  Now the good news is that the overall violent crime rate – 372.6 per 100,000 – is well below what it was five years ago when it stood at 404.5.  It’s also about 20% lower than it was ten years ago and more than 70% lower than its alarming peak in 1994. So yes, we are a lot safer than we were twenty years ago, on the other hand, a two-decade drop in violent crime may have come to an end.

            What’s more disturbing about the overall increase is that the biggest year-to-year increase occurred within the murder category which is, for most of us, the sine qua non of violent crime.  Every violent crime category – murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery – showed an increase from 2014 to 2015, but rape was up 5%, aggravated assault increased by 4%, robbery was just slightly higher, but the homicide rate jumped by 10%, and that’s a lot more dead bodies, 1,532 more dead bodies to be exact. And although the difference was not all that great, you might as well know that the percentage of murders committed with guns also slid up from 69% to 71%.

Now according to Gun-nut Nation, as the number of privately-owned guns goes up and, in particular, the number of gun-owners who are allowed to walk around carrying a gun goes up, violent crime is supposed to go down.  The idea that more guns equals less crime is not only the title of a book written by one of Gun-nut Nation’s most cherished mouthpieces, it has been the watchword of the entire marketing scheme for guns since white suburbanites became afraid of crime and people stopped hunting, both of which became kind of obvious even to the gun industry back when Ronald Reagan was making room at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the first George Bush.

Remember Willie Horton?  Bush’s 1988 opponent, Mike Dukakis, had the bad luck of having supported the furlough program which let Horton out of slam for a weekend furlough whereupon Horton went down to Maryland, raped a young woman and then was arrested and thrown back into jail.  Maybe the Horton ad swung the election for Bush and maybe it didn’t, but the one thing it certainly did was to focus attention on the issues of race and crime.  And this was the same time that the NRA began ramping up the campaign to get states to issue concealed-carry licenses (CCW), with only a handful of states going along with the idea in 1987 but more than 30 states granting near-automatic CCW by 1995.

It was also in the mid-90’s that a serious increase in violent crime due primarily to the crack-cocaine epidemic began to abate with a ten-year cycle of increasing crime rates from the mid-1980s being replaced with annual declines of violent crime which continued for the next twenty years.  And what accounted for this year-after-year decline in violent crime?  The ‘fact’ that so many Americans owned guns and more and more Americans were carrying concealed weapons outside their home.  The argument was first made by a Florida criminologist named Gary Kleck, then refurbished and expanded by another ersatz academic named John Lott, and just before the FBI released the 2015 numbers the gun industry’s official broadcaster, the National Shooting Sports Foundation blared on its website: “Gun Crimes Plummet As Gun Sales Rise.”

But how will the NSSF explain away the increase in violent crime while gun sales and CCW permits continue to soar?  I’ve got it!  Just blame it on the possibility that Hillary might defeat Trump and then immediately ban all guns. No matter which way you cut it, you’ll always find someone who believes the Martians have established a colony at Area 51.

‘Good Guys With Guns’ Is A Must-Read Book.

I maintain a short-list of ‘must-read’ books on gun violence, and right now a book written by a sociologist way up at Northland College in Wisconsin sits at the very top.  Angela Stroud’s book, Good Guys With Guns, should be read by everyone in the Gun Violence Prevention community because what she says is what everyone needs to know and understand about Gun-nut Nation’s obsession with guns.

           And it has become an obsession, at least with small percentage of gun owners who together, according to the recent Harvard-Northeastern study, own upwards of one hundred million guns, which works out to roughly fifteen guns apiece.  And this obsession takes its most evident form in the growth of concealed-carry permits, which is what Professor Stroud’s book is all about.

What she did was to go down to Texas (she happens to be a Texas native now transplanted to the shores of Lake Superior) and conduct interviews with 36 gunnies – 20 men, 16 women – who have concealed handgun licenses (CHL), along with going through a CHL course herself.  And while she made no attempt to conceal either her academic background or her research agenda, she had no trouble getting her interview subjects to blab about themselves at length.  And by the way, without realizing it, Professor Stroud quickly learned one thing about the residents of Gun-nut Nation, which is that they love to talk about their gun. So you have your work cut out for you if you want to weave a coherent and readable narrative out of interviews with 36 of these folks, but in this case the result is a very coherent, very readable and a very important book.

How representative are these 36 interview subjects for understanding the motives and views of the 14 million or so Americans who have been issued CHL-licenses over the past twenty or so years? In several respects – gender, income – they probably are somewhat outside the everyday demographic that we associate with gun nuts (mostly male, usually high school but no more) because this group was almost equally split between men and women and nearly half finished college and many hold advanced degrees.  But note that I am comparing the demographics of the author’s interview group with what we know about gun owners in general, not what we know (because we don’t know) about the backgrounds of people who hold a license which permits them to walk around with a gun.

And as far as this latter group is concerned, Professor Stroud hits the proverbial nail right on the proverbial head when she notes that CHL-licenses are usually given out to “white men and women in suburban areas” who are simply not going to be victims of crime.  In fact, with the exception of one woman who claimed to have been raped many years before, not a single person interviewed by the author had ever been menaced or victimized in any kind of criminal affair.

So why do these people fervently embrace the idea that guns are must-have “tools” to protect them from crime?  Because, and here is the most compelling aspect of this book, getting involved in what the author calls the CHL “culture” changes the way people think about threats, violence and self-defense.  And this comes out of perceptions about race and crime in which many Americans ‘privatize’ their response to social inequality by substituting an ‘I can fend for myself’ approach, thereby negating the value of structural (read: government) responses to the inequalities and inequities of inner-city life.

Remember how Reagan called government the ‘enemy’ during his 1980 campaign?  For some folks the government ‘enemy’ and the street ‘thug’ enemy is one and the same.  But you can protect yourself from both by carrying a gun. And the manner through which Angela Stroud explains all these connections is why she has written a brilliant book.

The Trump Campaign Really Wants The Minority Vote As Long As The Minorities Are Evangelicals And Folks Who Own Guns.

As much as we don’t want to admit it, more than 60 years after the Supreme Court said that separate wasn’t equal, a Presidential election appears to be turning on the issues of religion and race.  More than any previous Republican candidate, Trump-o injects religion and racism into just about everything he says, from leading the birther movement, to calling for the deportation of all ‘illegals,’ (read: non-whites) to ‘joking’ about ejecting non-Evangelicals, this guy’s campaign rallies sound and look like an advertisement for the Klan.

            While his supporters as well as media kibitzers continue to imbibe the Kool-Aid that Shlump’s success is based on something known as ‘anger about the present course of government,’ the truth is that the anger is all about religion and race, specifically, the feeling held by many Evangelical whites that their days of being in a majority of the population are coming to an end; i.e., today’s New York Times article profiling an Evangelical couple in Iowa who got some media attention three years ago when they refused to rent out a chapel on their property for a marriage ceremony involving two gay men.  They ended up being used as stage props by Ted Cruz before the Iowa primary and now feel betrayed and abandoned as the age of ‘Christian values’ appears to be coming to an end.

And why this loss of enthusiasm for a presidential candidate who is going out of his way to pander to the Evangelical vote?  “It all flipped so fast,” says Dick Odgaard. “Suddenly we were in the minority.”  The article goes on to say: “One day they felt comfortably situated in the American majority, as Christians with shared beliefs in God, family and the Bible. Overnight, it seemed, they discovered that even in small-town Iowa they were outnumbered, isolated and unpopular.”

As the grandchild of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, I find it a little difficult to sympathize with the Odgaards and their Evangelical compatriots because I knew from the gitgo that I wasn’t in the majority; I also knew from the gitgo that it made no difference at all. Which is why my grandparents came to the United States from a pogrom-torn zone in Russia rather than going somewhere else.  So I really have no idea how it feels to lose one’s ‘majority’ status, but perhaps my experience as a member of Gun-nut Nation might provide a lesson for how people who feel racially and culturally dispossessed should respond.

Want to know what it’s like to be a member of a minority group?  Buy a gun.  After all, according to the latest survey, only one out of five American adults owns a gun.  This happens to be about the same percentage who describe themselves as Evangelical Christians, according to a recent Pew poll. And even though gun ownership is protected by the 2nd Amendment, there’s also something in the Constitution known as the 1st Amendment which guarantees all those ‘minority’ Evangelicals the right to practice their religious beliefs as they see fit.

Meanwhile, talk to most members of Gun-nut Nation and they’ll tell you, 2nd Amendment notwithstanding, they are not only members of a minority, but a ‘persecuted’ minority at that.  And what’s the proof of this persecution?  Well, for beginners, we know that Hillary is hell-bent on taking away all the guns.  Now in fact she’s never said that, but decoding what she really means no matter what she says is a special technique used by members of persecuted minorities to identify and protect themselves from enemies both without and within.

When Fox News decided to produce a new show called Trump for President it was no accident that they asked the NRA to develop (and pay for) an advertising campaign.  After all, America’s ‘oldest civil rights organization’ has developed messaging for the persecuted minority of gun owners that is second to none.  Persecuted or not, Hillary better hope that Shlump-o’s Evangelicals and gun owners are still in a minority on November 8th.