Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 8
November 4, 2019
Think The NRA Throws So Much Money Around? Think Again.
The mail today included a new and interesting messaging
resource for the gun debate, namely, a printed newsletter, The Brady Report,
published by our friends at the Brady Campaign. It’s a glossy, four-page
document containing brief stories about how the Brady organization is coming
down hard on Gun-nut Nation as we gear up for next year’s national campaign.
I get almost daily mailings from the NRA, along
with a clothing catalog and requests for money from Wayne-o who seems to think
that the stink which came out of the stories about his financial
flim-flams are a thing of the past. But this is the first time I have ever
received a printed communication from the good guys on the other side.
What caught my eye about the Brady newsletter, however,
was a comment from Kris Brown, the President of Brady, who said this: “the
gun industry has been making massive donations to their political defenders,
making it nearly impossible to pass sensible, lifesaving measures or even to
hold manufacturers accountable and put unscrupulous dealers out of
business.”
I’ve been hearing about these ‘massive donations’ made
by the gun industry to their political friends for lo, these many years. With
all due respect to our friends at Brady and in particular to a dedicated and
committed activist like Kris Brown, I’m just not sure this so-called ‘massive’
financial support for pro-gun members of Congress is really all that massive or
makes all that much difference at all.
In 2018, the average cost of a Congressional campaign
was $1.5 million for a House seat, more than $5 million for a statewide race.
According to Open Secrets, the NRA gave a total of just under $700,000 to all GOP Congressional candidates, which
means that, on average, each member of the red team got $2,500 bucks. That’s
less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the money needed to run a Congressional
campaign. Some of the key GOP leadership in both houses got more – Cruz (R-TX) gets
$9,900, Scalise (R-LA) gets $5,450, but most of the spear-carriers are given a
whole, big two grand for their campaigns.
As for the gun manufacturers themselves, companies like
Smith & Wesson, Glock and Sig don’t have a PAC. In fact, even though they benefit from the
lobbying done on their behalf by the NRA, in the greater scheme of
things they don’t give zilch. The NRA‘s lobbying arm, NRA-ILA,
gets its money from the same nickel-and-dime donations the NRA receives
from its four million or five million or whatever number of members the
organization claims to have.
Let me make one point very clear, okay? If the NRA were to close down tomorrow
it would make no difference to me. In
fact, they would probably first try to sell off all their nice embossed polo
shirts and I’d jump at the opportunity to buy a couple of their shirts at half
price. But the argument they make about being the ‘first line of defense’ for
the 2nd Amendment has about as much reality behind it as the
argument made by Brady and other gun-control groups who claim they are the
‘last line of defense’ against the all-powerful NRA.
The reason most red-state politicians vote pro-gun is
because they represent constituents for whom owning a gun is no different than
owning any other basic consumer item found around the house. The average gun
owner who walks into my gun shop to buy another gun puts about as much psychic
concern into that decision as he puts into deciding which lottery ticket to buy
when he stops at the mini-mart for coffee on his way to work.
Until and unless the gun-control movement confronts the
fact that gun nuts don’t think of their guns as ‘weapons of war,’ or ‘threats
to public health’ or any other fearsome sobriquet used to describe what is, to
them, just another adult toy, there
won’t be the slightest chance that the gun industry will actually have to start
putting its money where its mouth is to continue keeping America awash in gun.
November 1, 2019
Is Concealed-Carry Good Or Bad?
Last week when I was at the gun show, I overheard a
conversation between three gents standing in line at the Dunkin’ Donuts kiosk,
which was the most popular booth at the show. The topic being discussed in very
serious tones was this: If you could only keep one handgun to carry around for
self-defense, which gun would it be?
Now readers of this column may find such a discussion
ridiculous, stupid, or worse, but what do you want three guys on Social
Security to talk about – the national debt? I mean, what could be more
important to the future of American civilization than whether I should be
walking around with a Sig, a Springfield or a Glock?
The truth is that most, if not nearly all the 15 to 20
million Americans who go to the trouble of getting a concealed-carry (CCW)
permit rarely, if ever actually carry
a gun. First of all, you don’t need to carry a gun because it’s not as if you
will ever find yourself in a situation where the gun would make the difference
between getting or not getting hurt. Second, the gun is heavy and unless it’s
kept concealed you’re going to wind up in the back of the patrol car with your
gun comfortably resting on the front seat. Third and most important, sooner or
later you’ll put the gun on the floor so that you’re more comfortable while you
take a dump, and the gun will somehow not go back into the holster while you
hitch up your pants.
There isn’t a single boy in the United States who by
the age of twelve hasn’t seen hundreds of bad guys being shot in video games,
movies or TV. If anything makes America
exceptional, it’s how we have created a culture which celebrates ‘virtuous
violence’ with the use of a gun. How many states now have stand-your ground
laws? Try thirty-three.
Notwithstanding the sanctimonious and holier-than-thou
preaching of so-called gun experts like David Hemenway
and John Donahue, the fact is
that gun owners with concealed-carry licenses are not only extremely
law-abiding, but rarely, if ever, engage in unlawful or dangerous behavior with
their guns. The last time I checked, the Violence Policy Center has still been
unable to identify more than 600 CCW-licensed individuals who committed
a fatal gun assault over the last 12 years.
Fifteen million people have CCW, less than 50 commit a fatal gun
assault every year and that makes CCW-holders a threat to community
safety? Give me a break.
On the other hand, anyone who thinks that these
law-abiding armed citizens constitute the frontline of defense against all
those street ‘thugs’ is also just blowing smoke. Sure, every once in a while someone pulls a
gun out from underneath the counter and plans to rob the mini-mart go awry. But
the NRA has never been able to validate
such acts of civilian bravery more than 50 times a year. The bottom line is that the notion that we
are becoming a nation of armed citizens basically gets down to the old guys who
were amusing themselves talking about their favorite handgun while standing on
the Dunkin’ Donuts line.
What motivated me to write this column was an exchange
between Corey Booker and Meghan McCain on The View, in which Meghan
claimed that her brother would never give up his guns if Booker became
President in 2021 and instituted a gun buyback plan. If the government
repurchased all AR rifles there would be plenty of black guns that
wouldn’t get turned in. But such a buyback would also result in no more new
assault rifles being made or sold.
Now if someone would finally be honest enough to admit
that by repurchasing all guns which really cause gun violence (i.e., handguns)
then maybe, just maybe we could end gun violence once and for all. But if we did that, what would those guys
waiting for their Dunkin’ Donuts coffee have to talk about? The national debt?
October 30, 2019
October 28, 2019
Let’s Go To A Gun Show.
Yesterday I went to the gun show that is held every
three months at a location about 20 miles from where I live. The show has been running for at least
twenty-five years and I see the same vendors and visitors year after year. It’s
a medium-sized show as gun shows go, maybe 150 vendors selling all kinds of
guns and gun-related stuff, maybe 300 – 400 folks wandering around at any one
time. The most popular location, of course, was the deli which features the
usual hot dogs and fries, there was also a Dunkin’ Donuts kiosk where a cup of
coffee ran three bucks.
I’m not saying that I conducted any kind of scientific
survey, but it’s not that difficult to get a pretty good read on who goes to a
gun shows these days. The people walking up and down the aisles were almost all
older White men, probably in their 60’s and above. The men outnumbered the
women by at least ten to one – so much for all the talk about how women are
‘getting into’ guns. Did I see any Brothers wandering around even though the
show’s location is less than ten minutes from a medium-sized city which is at
least fifty percent non-White? No.
As for the people who were sitting behind the vendor
tables, most of them were as old or older than the folks who came to the show
to look at guns. Of the 150 vendors, probably about one-third were selling guns
but only a handful were dealers with real gun shops, the rest were collectors
who are licensed as dealers but don’t actually run a real business of any kind.
It’s easy to spot the collectors as opposed to the real dealers, because the
collectors display guns that are at least a hundred years old. A 1903
Springfield rifle, for example, may have been manufactured prior to 1919, and I
saw at least 30 of these World War I vintage guns on vendor tables here and
there.
Of the 100 or so vendors who weren’t selling guns,
about half of them sold optics, holsters or knives, the other half were selling
all kinds of junk including jewelry, military-surplus clothing, books, targets
and other kinds of crap. I bought a nice, handmade leather holster for my Glock
17; I also got into a lively discussion with a guy who knew ‘for a fact’ that
every Democratic Presidential candidate, all 20 of them, had received large
payments from some oligarch in the Ukraine.
Ten years ago gun shows always had a couple of vendors
selling military memorabilia, in particular World War II medals, uniforms and
helmets, including stuff allegedly worn by Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima or the
Nazi SS. Those items have disappeared
from the gun show circuit, not because of political correctness, but because
nobody remembers or even knows anything about a war which ended more than 70
years ago.
And yes, the NRA was at the show because
America’s ‘first civil rights organization’ usually has a booth at every gun
show. For all the talk about how the NRA is going down the tubes and
Wayne-o is such a big crook, the NRA rep seemed to be having a good time
handing out applications and a list of upcoming NRA events.
One big change: I didn’t see a single vendor selling MAGA
hats or t-shirts extolling the virtues of Donald Trump. In fact, for all the
talk about how gun owners are the bedrock of the alt-right, the show was
decidedly non-political in every respect. If anyone was walking around with a
petition calling on Nancy Pelosi to ‘open up’ the impeachment process, he was
keeping very much out of sight.
This show takes place three miles away from an
inner-city neighborhood where shootings are a daily part of life. Perhaps
someone can explain to me how closing down this show would do anything to reduce
gun violence in that nearby neighborhood or anywhere else.
October 25, 2019
The NRA Might Be Down, But They’re Not Out.
There was a surprise for me in my mailbox yesterday,
namely, the November issue of American Rifleman, which happens to be the
premier publication of the NRA.
The reason I was surprised was that back in April, a detailed story by Mike Spies that was carried
in The New Yorker and The Trace provoked an avalanche of criticism
about America’s ‘first civil rights organization’ which made it appear that the
pro-gun group was headed for a quick demise.
Not only did the NRA find itself being attacked for
shabby bookkeeping, sweetheart business dealings and all kinds of other
nefarious deeds, but for the first time in more than 40 years, an attempt was made to
jettison the leadership and bring in an entirely new management group. The
effort collapsed when it turned out that the chief promoter of this coup
d’etat, Oliver North, was himself profiting from an inside deal with the NRA‘s
advertising agency which led to the NRA giving the boot both to North
and to the advertising agency as well.
Despite this reprieve, the news for the NRA kept
getting worse and worse, with simultaneous investigations being carried out by
the New York State Attorney General (the NRA is incorporated in New York
as a not-for-profit corporation) along with an investigation by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) about
the alleged connections between the NRA and Maria Butina, the so-called
Russian ‘spy.’ The latter effort resulted Wyden’s report which didn’t show any
unlawful NRA activity at all; the former investigation will shlep on until
even the cows in all those upstate New York counties come home.
What really got things going, however, was that more
than 80 people were killed and injured in two mass shootings which occurred in
just two days. The shooting in El Paso on August 3 took 22 lives and injured 24
more; the next day a shooting in Dayton resulted in another 10 killed and 27
injured. That’s quite a score.
Whenever there is a mass shooting two things occur: 1).
There is an immediate spike in media coverage and public concern about the
event; 2). The gun-control narrative to define these shootings invariably finds
some way or another to blame the NRA. Either the NRA is guilty of
preventing laws that would curb the violence, or the NRA promotes armed,
self-defense which is just another way to spread the idea that guns are good,
gun-grabbers are bad.
After all the sturm und drang about guns after
those mass shootings, the whole issue of gun control has once again gone back to
where it always sits; namely, nobody really cares about it at all. The keywords
‘gun violence’ spiked to four times the usual level of Google searches
during the week of August 4 -10; it’s now back to just about the lowest level
recorded this year. As for the Presidential candidates,
they went through their usual talking-points about guns during their last
debate, but the fact that gun control is no longer a toxic issue for Democrats
is old news.
On the other hand, getting back to my beloved American
Rifleman, the issue contains the usual mélange of reviews of new guns and
shooting products and a great article on the M1903-A1 Springfield that was our
sniper rifle in World War II. But the issue also contains a lengthy op-ed by
Wayne-o, which can be seen on the NRA website, a commentary
about the ‘future of the NRA.”
Compared to the NRA’s messaging over the last few
years, Wayne-o’s commentary is actually pretty tame stuff. Gone is the bombast
of video performers like Colion Noir, gone is the racially-tinged stupidities
of Dana Loesch, gone is the attempt to make the NRA a leading voice for
the alt-right. If anything, the tone and content of Wayne-o’s spiel reminds me
of what I heard when I went to NRA shows in 1980 and 1981.
This change in NRA communication strategy
actually seems to be working quite well. From April through June the NRA
website registered
around 500,000 visits each month. The total for September was 1,750,000 – that’s
right, more than three times as many visits as when things were going to Hell.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of the NRA‘s
death may be greatly exaggerated.
October 21, 2019
Do More Guns Really Mean More Gun Violence?
Over the least quarter-century, the debate about guns and gun violence has coalesced into two camps. One camp, let’s call it the ‘guns are good’ (GAG) camp, says that guns protect us from violence and crime. The other camp, let’s call it the ‘guns are bad’ (GAB) camp, says that guns cause more violence and crime. The GAG has been led by our friend John Lott. The GAB has been led by our friend David Hemenway. Today’s column will examine the argument made by the GAB.
In multiple articles plus a well-known and oft-cited book, Hemenway claims that the rate of violent crime is no different between the U.S. and other ‘advanced’ nation-states. On the other hand, the U.S. has a much higher rate of fatal, violent crime, a difference caused by the private ownership of some 300 million guns.
Hemenway
and other public-health researchers refer to their approach as creating an
‘epidemiology’ of gun violence; i.e., figuring out where (geographically) and when (numerically) this particular form
of injury occurs. Unfortunately, the comparison he makes between the U.S. and
other ‘advanced’ countries is wrong on both counts.
If Hemenway
and his public health cohorts actually believe that comparing any health event
in a country of 320 million people with another country that holds one-tenth
that population or less gives us any insights into how to deal with that
particular health problem, then all I can say is that you can use numbers to
prove anything you want. Of the 34
countries currently in the OECD, ten have a total population of less than 30 million. Does anyone
really believe that we can come up with a valid explanation about anything
if we compare what happens in the U.S. to what goes on, for example, in
Luxembourg, whose total population is .001 percent of ours?
Luxembourg
covers an area of 998 square miles, which happens to be one-fifth the size of
Connecticut. If you stuck Luxembourg into Montana, it would be a tiny speck.
And yet Hemenway and other GAB researchers want us to believe that a
cross-national comparison between the United States and a country like
Luxembourg should be the basis on which we develop ‘reasonable’ national gun
laws, right?
The GAB
argument breaks down even further when we forget cross-national comparisons and
just look at the rate of violent crime within the United States. According to the FBI-UCR, the U.S.
violent crime rate in 2017 was 394 per 100K. But this number, particularly the
more than 17,000 homicides which contribute 1.3% of the crimes to the overall
number of violent crimes, is also rather meaningless when discussed in global
terms.
In fact,
on a regional basis, the homicide rate of 5.3 breaks down like this: Northeast
– 3.5; Midwest – 5.7; South – 6.4; West – 4.5.
Taken together, the 15 Southern states represent almost half the total
homicides of the country as a whole. The
Northeast, on the other hand, represents just 11% of all homicides, although
the total regional population is just about half the number of people living in
the South.
To
compare the overall rate of gun violence in the U.S. to other countries is
basically a false comparison precisely because the murder rates in different
parts of our country vary to such an extreme degree. If Hemenway and his public
health research colleagues want to pretend they are creating an ‘epidemiology’
of gun violence, they should stop talking about a ‘national crisis’ and start
looking at what the numbers really say. What the numbers really say is that we
have a severe public health problem called ‘gun violence’ which shows up most
frequently in the Southern states.
My
mail-list includes all the public health researchers who support the GAB
idea. If any of them want to reply to this column, I’ll gladly post their words
right here. But if there’s one thing which seems to unite virtually the entire
community of gun-violence public health researchers, it’s their obsessive
desire to avoid any public debate about their own work. So we’ll see what we
see.
October 17, 2019
Josh Montgomery: Staying Stable While Shooting.
Staying
Stable While Shooting
The importance of shooting
stability is often overrated – especially the fact that it is linked
with the safety of the shooter and not only. The truth is that the two of them
are connected. You need to have the right posture in order to increase your
shooting accuracy. And the right posture can be achieved through stability.
There is a study that
analyzes the relationship between the two.
On that note, today, we will
introduce you to some handy tips. These tips should help you optimize your
stability when shooting. It’s important to become more responsible shooters,
especially if you want to safeguard the safety of your family and children.
The
Right Shooting Stance
Some people might think that the
way in which you stand doesn’t impact the way you shoot. This is not true,
though. This is basically the very foundation of shooting. And when you don’t
have a steady foundation, the odds are that your shooting performance will be
affected, to some extent or another.
It goes without saying that
recoil and loud explosions are in no way fun or expected. Not to mention that
they could really jeopardize your safety. If we were to get technical, there
are three primary types of stances – namely Weaver, Isosceles and Chapman. These
represent different variations of leg and arm placement.
When you have the right shooting
stance, this will help you stay stable. And most importantly, this will allow
you to get better at shooting. The right technique can really make the world of
a difference. We can say just the same about picking the right gun. Whether we
are talking about lighter
and smaller guns for women or big, massive rifles, your
shooting stance is an essential element. Make sure you have it right. And if you
don’t, it’s never too late to learn a bit more about it.
The
Importance of Handgun Grip
The next thing on the list is
definitely the handgun grip. When you hold a gun, you need to be serious about
it. Just as you would be about holding your future or your safety, so to speak.
That doesn’t mean you should grip the handgun as hard as you can since this
could backfire as well. You need to feel confident whenever you take the gun in
your hand. And this has to do with a firm, secure grip.
When you have a firm handgun
grip, this will diminish the movement of your non-trigger-fingers. This is,
essentially a good thing. Not to mention that the manner in which you hold your
gun will impact your accuracy. Ideally, the distance between your trigger
finger and your thumb should be high. In this way, the grip will contain the
recoil of the slide that moves back and forth.
Usually, it’s advisable to keep
your support hand really high on the back of the gun. You might even attempt to
get some of your hand behind the grip if that’s a possibility. Once you do
that, you can even keep the thumbs forward – depending on the size of your
hands. Or you can keep the thumbs high. This will keep your wrists in place.
Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that your grip also has to do with your
individual hand and the size of your finger – of course.
Now, let’s say your hands are
smaller, which would make your fingers a bit shorter. In this case, your thumbs
will imminently be pointed more upright. This only means that you should keep
experimenting, testing different techniques and pinpointing what works best to
boost your stability.
Keep
Your Elbows Bent
Did you ever think that the way
in which you keep your elbows has to do with your shooting stability? This
should go without saying.
Most people assume that they
enjoy more control over the handgun if they keep their elbows locked, so to
speak. But this is rarely the case. Usually, you get more control and stability
by keeping your elbows a bit bent. Why would you do that? There are several
ways in which we could explain this.
For one thing, this will help
your elbows to act as natural shock
absorbers. Therefore, you will control the recoil better. Another aspect
worth noting would be that this determines you to keep your wrists in place so
that you maintain the sights aligned with your eyes. Meanwhile, a slight bend
in the elbows will allow you to deter driving the first shot low whenever
you’re in a hurry to shoot.
You might even keep your elbows a
bit up. This will create inward crushing pressure.
Take
Your Time
A common mistake most people do
is lifting the finger off immediately after every shot and looking at the
target. The truth is that the target won’t run anywhere. It will still be there
a few seconds later, which only means you should take your time. When you take
off the finger too quickly, the likelihood of firing too fast and jerking the
trigger is higher. Another risk that comes with the territory would be adding
excess movement to the gun.
Not to mention that you’ll make your
life more difficult when you’ll shoot the next fire. This is where proper
trigger reset can make the world of a difference. This can maintain the trigger
all the way at the end. In addition to that, this will release the trigger at
the right time – when you’ll feel the click. It’s a good thing not to rush
yourself, especially if you’re just starting out. Even when it comes to
experienced shooters, this doesn’t make it appropriate to do things in a rushed
way, as this could impair your safety.
The
Bottom Line
Shooting is not as simple as it
may seem. And if you’re concerned about the importance of safety when shooting,
these tips should come in handy. The bottom line is that you won’t become a pro
in a matter of days. These things take time, and you should be patient with
yourself. You’ll get there before you know it with perseverance and
determination.
October 16, 2019
Should We Ban Assault Rifles?
I normally don’t watch the Democratic debates because
it’s still too early in the primary season and no matter who ends up with the
nomination I’m going to vote blue every, single time. You see, I have this
congenital physical ailment which when I get into a voting booth and reach for
the Republican lever, my arm gets paralyzed and I can’t vote. I’m a bone fide
gun nut and a yellow-dog Democrat and I’m proud of both.
So I didn’t watch the debate last night but I did
happen to see commentaries about the exchange between Buttigieg and Beto over
Beto’s call for a mandatory buyback of AR-15’s. As I understand it, the media
has decided that the Democrats are split between a ‘middle’ led by Joe and a
‘radical’ led maybe by Bernie, maybe by Warren, maybe by Ocasio, blah, blah,
blah and blah. And the media has further decided that Buttigieg is somewhere in
the middle while Beto is somewhere on the extreme. And what the media has decided is the acid test for where these two guys perch is over the issue of
getting rid of AR-15’s.
Now who would have ever thought that any kind of gun
issue would be used to define the basic stance of the candidate who wants to
lead the blue ticket in the national election next year? I can see defining the candidates on
something like universal health care, or whether or not to ‘tax the rich,’ or
some other issue which hits in the middle of the must-do zone. But guns?
Anyway, the argument between Buttigieg and Beto erupted
because the kid from Texas has opted for a mandatory buyback of assault rifles,
while Buttigieg wants to try and remain somehow relevant to Gun-nut Nation by
saying that we can ask but shouldn’t require that gun owners turn over those
lethal guns. And the way that Buttigieg is framing the argument is to challenge
Beto to explain exactly how he is going to force assault-rifle owners to turn
over their guns.
Beto doesn’t yet have a plan to invoke the coercive authority
of the government to get rid of all those black guns, but why should he be made
to come clean on this issue when Liz Warren has promised to reduce gun violence
by 80 percent without yet producing any plan at all? And let me tell you
something about Lizzie; she produces position papers on just about everything
under the sun. But so far we still don’t know how 120,000 fatal and non-fatal
gun injuries each year will be cut down to 20,000 or less. So why should we
expect Beto to explain how the government will pick up and throw out some
crummy, semi-automatic guns?
If this is the best that Buttigieg can do to vault
himself ahead of Beto in the polls, I think he should go back to South Bend and
figure out to keep the city parks neat and clean. That’s what municipal mayors
are paid to do – collect the garbage, sweep the streets, make sure that
everyone scoops up their doggie doo-doo, essential city services like
that. If someone asked me to go out and
campaign for Buttigieg after he challenged Beto on something as stupid as
whether an assault weapon buyback should be mandatory or not, to quote my old
friend Jimmy Breslin, rather I should go lay brick.
Mandating or not mandating a buyback of assault rifles isn’t
going to make any great difference in how we deal with the violence caused by
guns. What a buyback does, mandated or not, is to keep the issue of gun
lethality where it belongs, namely, whether people understand the risks
inherent in owning certain kinds of guns.
If you want to own an assault rifle and assume the risk, that’s fine. We all do risky things every day. But anyone who tells you that an AR-15 is just another ‘sporting’ gun is either lying or doesn’t know anything about guns.
October 15, 2019
Tom Gabor: Gun Violence Is A Violation Of Human Rights
With mass shootings this summer at a Walmart in El Paso, a California garlic festival, and in Dayton’s entertainment district, Americans can justifiably ask whether they are safe in any setting. A related question is whether people have the right to be safe in their communities. Do children have the right to attend school without fearing a mass shooting?
Debates over gun policy take place
on two major fronts. First, there are
the scientific arguments as to whether gun ownership levels in an area, gun
carrying, or the presence of guns in the home enhance or detract from public or
personal safety. Most of the science in
this area indicates that raising levels of gun ownership is detrimental to
public safety overall.[i] Certainly, there are instances in which guns
are used successfully in self-defense but these cases are outnumbered many
times over by those in which guns are used to commit crime, to threaten or
intimidate others (including domestic partners), or to commit suicide. Consider an FBI investigation of active
shooter incidents. Despite the fact that
there are 120 guns for every 100 Americans, just one of 160 of these incidents
studied by the Bureau was stopped by an armed civilian.[ii]
The second front on which the gun debate
is waged relates to civil rights. This
debate has largely been one-sided with gun rights advocates and the gun lobby frequently
thwarting the passage of gun laws on the basis that the laws in question
violate their Second Amendment rights.
The Second Amendment was interpreted
historically by the courts as the right to bear arms within the context of
militia service. For example, in United States v. Miller (1939), two
defendants who had been prosecuted for failing to register and pay a tax for
possessing and carrying a sawed-off shotgun across state lines argued that such
requirements under the National Firearms Act violated their Second Amendment
rights. The US Supreme Court ultimately
ruled that such a weapon had no role in an organized militia and was therefore
not protected by the Second Amendment.
Following a decades-long campaign by
the National Rifle Association to promote the view that the Second Amendment
guaranteed a right to bear arms to individuals outside of militia service—a
view characterized by former Chief Justice Warren Burger as the greatest fraud
on the American public—the US Supreme Court did rule in the 2008 Heller decision that individuals had the
right to own an operable gun in the home for protection. However, writing for the majority in the 5-4
decision, Justice Antonin Scalia—a hunter and a conservative—made it clear that
this right was not unlimited and that laws regulating the carrying of firearms,
denying gun ownership to felons and the mentally ill, and prohibiting the
carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons did not violate the Second
Amendment.
The militia view of the Amendment does
not recognize the “right to keep and bear arms” as an individual right at all
and, hence, is not an impediment to laws that would restrict gun ownership
outside of militia service. The Heller decision, too, leaves a great
deal of room to regulate guns. In fact, since Heller, an overwhelming majority of Second Amendment challenges to
federal, state, and local gun laws have been rejected by the courts.[iii] Still, the NRA’s campaign to sell the
narrative that individuals have an absolute right to possess virtually any
firearm has altered public opinion and has led to endless debates about how
limited or expansive is the right to bear arms.
What gets lost in these debates
about gun rights is the vast majority of Americans who are not gun owners or
who are otherwise concerned about public safety. What about their rights to feel safe? What about the rights of children who are
terrified to go to school? What about
the right to speak one’s mind or to enjoy a night out without intimidation by
people carrying guns? These are not
academic questions as the US has the most armed population in the world. The US is also an outlier, relative to other
high-income countries, with regard to the permissiveness of its laws in
relation to gun carrying and the ownership of military-style weapons. In addition, with one hundred Americans dying
from gunfire and one mass shooting each day, the US is exceptional with regard
to its high level of gun mortality. Communities of all sizes are affected and
marginalized communities suffer disproportionately.
While the rights-based debate rages
on about the meaning and scope of the Second Amendment, the right of the public
as a whole to be safe from gun violence has been ignored. The absence of attention to the public’s
right to safety is surprising given that the US has signed or ratified a number
of human rights conventions that can be applied to gun violence. Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights affirms that “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security
of person.”[iv] The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
states that no person “shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life (Article 6).[v]
The US has also signed the International Convention on
the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination; however, African
Americans have exceptionally high levels of gun mortality relative to the rest
of the population, are disproportionately the victims of police-involved
shootings and of vigilante-type shootings enabled by the Stand Your Ground laws
passed by half the states. While the US
has signed the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination
Against Women, the country has also been slow to protect women in the US as
they are far more likely to be murdered by gunfire than in other advanced
countries. An abuser’s access to guns
increases the risk of death to women by five-fold, yet laws generally allow men
with a history of violence to get around background checks by purchasing guns
on the private market, permit abusive boyfriends to own guns, and fail to
require the surrender of guns by those who threaten women. The US has signed but not ratified the
Convention of the Rights of the Child. Still,
US children and teens are 32 times more likely to die of a gun homicide and 10
times more likely to die of a gun suicide or accident than their peers in the
other high-income countries combined.[vi]
The human rights group Amnesty
International argues in a 2018 report, In the Line of Fire, that the US has breached
its commitments under international human rights law. AI writes:
“The USA has failed to implement a
comprehensive, uniform and coordinated system of gun safety laws and
regulations particularly in light of the large number of firearms in circulation,
which perpetuates unrelenting and potentially avoidable violence, leaving
individuals susceptible to injury and death from firearms.”[vii]
AI
further notes that, as part of the right to life and other human rights, the responsibilities
of nations to prevent gun violence requires: 1) restricting access to firearms,
especially on the part of those at an elevated risk of misusing them; and 2) implementing
violence reduction measures where firearm misuse persists. The human rights group asserts that nations
should establish robust regulatory systems, including licensing, registration,
restriction of certain weapon types, safe storage, research, and policy
development. Nationally, the US has done
little or nothing in relation to any of these policies and has seen Congress,
at the behest of the NRA, suppress funding for research dating back to
1996. Amnesty notes that countries not
only have obligations to protect the life of individuals from state agents but
from actual or foreseeable threats at the hands of private actors as well. Violence is especially foreseeable in low
income neighborhoods with persistently high levels of violence, poor public
services, and policing that may not comply with international standards.
It
is time to recognize public safety as a human right and for the US to adopt
national policies, such as the licensing of gun owners, restrictions on gun
carrying, and a ban on weapons of war.
Consistent with the notion that public safety is a human right, I have
drafted A Declaration of the Right of
Americans to Live Free from Gun Violence—please visit: http://thomasgaborbooks.com/a-declaration-of-rights/. I’m hoping
that different levels of government and groups concerned about gun policy will
endorse the Declaration and issue proclamations asserting that safety from gun
violence is a human right.
[i]
For a review of the vast body of research on these matters, see T. Gabor’s
Confronting Gun Violence in America (2019) or David Hemenway’s Private Guns,
Public Health (2006).
[ii]
FBI, A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United States Between 2000 and 2013.
[iii]
Giffords Law Center, Second Amendment Basics; https://lawcenter.giffords.org/gun-laws/the-second-amendment/second-amendment-basics/
[iv]
Universal Declaration of Human Rights; https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
[v]
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/ProfessionalInterest/ccpr.pdf
[vi]
Children’s Defense Fund. Protect
Children not Guns.
[vii]
Amnesty International, In the Line of Fire:
Human Rights and the US Gun Violence Crisis, p.5; https://www.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/egv_exec_sum.pdf
October 8, 2019
Should The CDC Sponsor Gun Research?
It has been more than 30 years since the CDC eliminated gun violence from its research budget, but the hiatus may be coming to an end. The Democrats have stuck $50 million into the CDC budget, whether the line item will survive the usual horse-trading between the House and the Senate remains to be seen. Nevertheless, the fact that the funding of gun research is even being discussed by all the Democratic Presidential candidates is a development which many of us believed we would never live to see.
That being the case, I find myself in something of a dilemma because I am not sure that any of this research will necessarily yield positive results. Why do I say this? How can I afford to disagree so radically from a time-honored narrative supported by virtually everyone who wants gun violence to come to an end? After all, public policies should always be based on valid research, and who can provide such research about gun violence except my friends in public health?
There’s only one little problem. Which is that the research activity on gun violence done by public health scholars to date lacks one, fundamental element that should be present in all evidence-based research, namely, a self-imposed requirement that the point of publishing research is to invite, indeed demand public critiques from other researchers in the same field.
Unfortunately, public health gun research is the only field of academic research which can’t seem to ever produce public debate of any kind. If I had a nickel for every gallon of ink spilled by public health researchers on the so-called mistakes made by John Lott, I could stop working for a living, go down to Delray Beach and buy a condo at King’s Point. On the other hand, if I had a nickel for every ounce of ink that public health researchers have spilled criticizing the work of themselves or their peers, maybe I should go down to Lake Okeechobee and rent an unfurnished trailer at Canal Point.
And by the way, I’m not so sure that Lott’s thesis about more legally-owned guns resulting in less crime is necessarily all that wrong. If you eliminate the words ‘legally-owned’ from his argument, what he says may be more correct than not. The problem with John’s work is that he assumes something about the spread of concealed-carry laws (CCW) which probably isn’t true; namely, that criminals intent on attacking someone else usually commit violent crimes against law-abiding folks.
In fact,
most victims of violent crimes happen to be the same kinds of people who commit
those crimes; younger, minority males living in inner-city neighborhoods being the
most typical types of people treated in the ER for gun injuries, fatal or not.
These young men don’t have CCW but probably more of them are now walking
around with illegal guns. For all we know, Lott’s thesis that armed,
self-defense may be an effective deterrent to violent crime might be correct,
even if this deterrence factor is most frequently found within the
criminal-prone population itself.
I began
thinking about the ‘more guns = less crime’ argument from this perspective
after reading research on gun violence published by criminologists, scholars for
example like Marvin Wolfgang, whose studies on both teen-age delinquency and homicide
have never been surpassed. Of course Wolfgang, considered
by some to be the ‘most influential criminologist in the English-speaking
world,’ is persona non-grata in the public health field since he had the
audacity to suggest
that maybe Gary Kleck’s research on armed, self-defense should not be simply dismissed.
I simply
do not understand how anyone can claim to be conducting ‘evidence-based research’
when the evidence is never subject to public, critical review. Of course I hope
the CDC restores funding for gun research, but I would also hope that the
resumption of such funding be tied to some degree of critical, self-analysis by
the public health research community itself.
I may be
the smartest person I ever met, but there are plenty of folks who would disagree.
Which is why anyone is free to post a comment on what I write.
