Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 90

What’s The GVP Community Going To Do About Trump? They Better Do Something.

When was the last time that gun violence was a defining issue in a national political campaign? Never.  The stories still circulate about how the NRA knocked off Al Gore in the 2000 election, but whether or not that was true, neither Bush nor Gore ever went strong for or against the gun vote per se.

But this time it’s different.  Hillary has used gun violence quite effectively against ‘crazy’ Bernie, and she’s evidently going to carry this strategy over to the general election against the Shlump.  That is, if she’s the candidate.  Which is why I referred above to the Senator from Vermont in the vernacular.  Who knows?  It’s been an altogether different kind of campaign.

           And one of the major differences is the degree to which guns figure so prominently in the campaign rhetoric on both sides.  It started with Trump who began boasting of his love affair with the 2nd Amendment following the murder of two television journalists in Virginia; the issue was then ramped up by Hillary after the killings at Umpqua CC.  Trump now routinely tells his adoring fans that he’ll scrap gun-free zones on ‘day one,’ even though an Executive Order cannot be used to change Federal law (parenthetically, the failure of the ‘mainstream’ media to vigorously attack Shlump-o for his outright and endless lying is an absolute disgrace for which they should all be fired); Hillary will no doubt put expanded background checks at the top of her legislative agenda.

As might be expected, the NRA is going all-out to promote themselves and their members as the first line of defense against a new wave of gun grabbing promoted by Hillary and her friends.  Do I get a daily email from Chris Cox reminding me how critical it is to donate to the NRA-ILA so that friendly, pro-gun politicians can get elected or re-elected on November 8th?  Is New York a city?

I also get appeals from Brady and other GVP organizations to support their work, but the increasingly belligerent rhetoric about gun ‘rights’ employed by the Shlump campaign goes unnoticed and unmentioned.  The last two fundraising communications from GVP organizations talked about conducting a ‘reasoned conversation’ and asking Congress “to take immediate action to pass commonsense gun safety measures.”   Neither mentioned that Trump is going around the country saying that he’ll sign a 50-state, reciprocal CCW law.

So folks, let me break the news to you gently. If Republicans retain control of Congress and President Shlump is installed at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I guarantee you that such a bill will be on his Oval Office desk within 30 days. At which point, when it comes to ‘sensible’ GVP regulations, or any other efforts to reduce gun violence, no matter how politely you package it, the gig is up.

And don’t make the mistake of thinking that once the nominating conventions are over, that you can use the specter of that wavy-haired jerk in the White House as a good fundraising device, because you’ll have too much competition on that playing field as well.  For every GVP money request I currently receive, I get at least five from crazy Bernie and just as many or more from the Clinton campaign.  And the folks running for local and statewide races both in my state and other states haven’t even started to gear up.

I don’t sit on the inside of any GVP organization so maybe I don’t really know what’s going on.  But what I hope is going on is a discussion about the Trump menace not within each GVP organization but between organizations.  Because if the GVP community doesn’t get together, plan and implement a united strategy that can maximize resources in the struggle against what is certainly a united effort on the other side, then the NRA might again take credit for the results of another national election and their candidate will owe them big time.  Think about that.

‘The Gunning Of America’ Is A Good And Serious Book.

Pamela Haag describes herself as an “award-winning nonfiction writer, essayist, cultural commentator, and historian.”  And she has just published a new book, The Gunning of America, which fills some interesting gaps in the history of America’s first manufacturing industry, a.k.a., small arms.  The book is based on painstaking and detailed research in documents from, among others, the company archives of Winchester, Remington and Colt, supplemented by generous citations from primary and secondary sources, including personal correspondence of the early gun makers, articles and notices from the daily press and a pretty comprehensive knowledge of other contemporary, secondary works.  In other words, this is a serious history book.

Winchester 1873

What Haag attempts to show is that guns may not have been an intrinsically American phenomenon had it not been for the marketing energies and activities of the founders of companies like Colt, Remington and Winchester, all of whom attempted to push as many guns as possible into domestic and foreign markets in order to protect and improve company bottom lines. On more than one occasion, companies like Colt and Smith & Wesson were only able to keep the factory doors open by aggressively pursuing government contracts both here and abroad; the senior management of Winchester never stopped reminding the sales force of the necessity to sell every single gun.

One of the gaps filled by this book is its focus on guns not as representing political beliefs or cultural attitudes, but as a business in and of itself.  The author quite rightly says that “the gun business, as a business, remains invisible, a secret in the closet of the gun culture,” and this book is an effort to bring it out of the closet, so to speak, and examine it on its own business terms.

The problem in trying to look at the gun business through a business prism develops, however, when the author attempts to compare how the gun business marketed itself in past times as opposed to the way it explains itself now.  The author is absolutely correct when she says that current-day efforts by the industry to picture itself as ‘exceptional’ based on a unique relationship that America has with guns is not an accurate picture of how and why the civilian ownership of hundreds of millions of small arms came about.  Rather, the idea that every American should have a gun was a marketing strategy of gun makers from the earliest times precisely because some way had to be found to convince consumers that guns were not just another ordinary product that they could either own or do without.

What makes Pamela Haag’s argument somewhat problematic, however, is that while she captures nicely and accurately the marketing message employed by the gun business today, she basically ends her discussion of the actual workings of the gun industry in the 1920’s, nearly a century ago.  So while she is correct in saying that by 1900 gun sales were relying on demand caused by “desire and affinity, rather than utility,” the marketing message has now swung back to the argument for utility, except that utility is now defined in a much different way.

The reason that the numero uno gun company in America happens to be an Austrian outfit by the name of Glock is because the gun industry has replaced the iconic figure of the gun totin’ Western sheriff (or the gun-totin’ San Francisco cop) with the gun-totin’ armed citizen whose right to defend himself and his family doesn’t just derive from the 2nd Amendment, but comes straight from God.  And if you think I’m overstating the case for the alliance between guns, concealed-carry and the Almighty, just listen to Wayne-o’s convocation speech delivered at Liberty University earlier this year.

I like books that are well written and well researched and this one is both.  And I agree with Pam Haag that in our efforts to reduce gun violence the spotlight needs to shine more brightly on gun makers themselves. Too bad she couldn’t gain access to the archive of the NSSF.

 

Should Doctors Talk To Patients About Guns? They Talk About Other Risks, Don’t They?

This week Dr. Garen Wintemiute and several colleagues published an article that detailed both the legal and clinical issues involved in counseling patients about guns. Not only did the article summarize the current legal environment surrounding doctor-patient communications, but it also presented a schema for helping doctors to determine how to respond to a patient’s access to guns based on factors such as depression, substance abuse and other known causes for violence against oneself or others.

           The article received significant exposure both within and without the medical community, so it didn’t take long for a few physicians whose self-appointed task is to defend gun-owning America against the evil intrusions of gun-grabbing physicians to respond.  The first response was by a physician in California who claims that asking patients about gun ownership infringes on their 2nd-Amendment rights.  So, according to this logic, the 2nd Amendment only allows Americans to own guns, it prevents any discussion about guns.

This gun-loving doctor, Arthur Przebinda, agrees with Wintemute that doctors should be allowed to engage in gun counseling if the patient “shows signs of mental illness,” but he nevertheless finds Wintemute’s report ‘misleading’ because – are you ready for this one? – it is based on Wintemute’s own research. [My italics.]

Is this guy serious?  Does he expect a single medical professional to take him seriously because he claims that Wintemute’s article is in error because it is based on Wintemute’s own research?  What should a peer-reviewed article in a medical journal be based on?  No research?

But the truth is that Przebinda isn’t interested in communicating his nonsense to the medical community; his sole agenda is to try and influence the thoughts of gun owners, some of whom might otherwise be tempted to actually take seriously what medicine believes to be the problem with guns.  And the problem with guns is very simple: they constitute a risk.  How much of a risk?  This remains a subject of debate because thanks to the twenty-year freeze of CDC gun research, a freeze that Dr. Przebinda wholeheartedly supports, sufficient research has not been accomplished to determine exactly the degree to which gun ownership increases the possibility of deaths or injuries from intentional or unintentional use of a gun.

“They’re trying to identify gun ownership as a risk factor, the same way they would define smoking inside the house,” says Przebinda, and that’s exactly the point.  Because smoking is harmful. And so are guns. Period. End of story.  What does Dr. Przebinda think happens to human tissue when it is struck by an ounce of lead travelling faster than the speed of sound?

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying that it’s wrong to own a gun.  And if someone believes, massive evidence to the contrary, that keeping a gun in their home makes them safe from crime, then they can believe it all they want.  And they can also own a gun. But when was the last time doctors made a decision about what constitutes medical risk based on whether a marketing organization like the NRA agreed with them or not?  Did doctors refrain from asking patients whether they smoked before cigarette companies admitted that smoking causes cancer and other serious disease?

A rational and reasonable medical response to Pzrebinda’s pro-gun stance is provided by Dr. Eric Fleegler from Boston Children’s Hospital who says that discussions about guns should be “delicate conversations.”  But let’s remember that many discussions between doctors and their patients are delicate, which is exactly why such conversations are protected from public disclosure no matter what the NRA and their pro-gun acolytes would like gun owners to believe.

Physicians engage in very private and very delicate discussions all the time: an elderly parent is losing his mind, a teenage child is into drugs. These are medical risks that only doctors can evaluate and help patients to better understand. Which doesn’t mean the patient has to ever go along with what the doctor says. But it still has to be said. Guns are a risk.

What Should Doctors Ask Patients About Guns? Everything.

You may recall that back in April, 2015, eight national medical organizations plus the American Bar Association called deaths and injuries from guns a “major public health problem in the United States,” and asked for a stronger medical response to gun violence. Now if these medical groups, representing every medical specialty, had issued a joint statement about any other medical issue that causes more than 100,000 deaths and injuries each year, the public reaction would have ranged from ‘what took you so long?’ to ‘let’s get to work and solve the problem.’  But in this instance, of course, much of the public reaction came in the form of the now-traditional response by Gun Nation, telling the tribe that this was simply another attempt by gun-grabbing, anti-gunners to take away all the guns.

              When medical groups advocated in favor of seat belts, did anyone say that car safety wasn’t a medical issue because physicians didn’t, as a rule, undergo training on car repair?  The proper medical response to any problem that causes injury is both prevention and cure; prevent the injury before it happens which reduces the number of people who then show up looking for a cure.  But the gun lobby is wedded to the idea that there is no such medical condition known as ‘gun violence,’ and to degree that on a rare basis someone accidentally gets hurt using a gun, it’s a small price to pay considering that armed citizens prevent millions of crimes each year.

Having observed the ease with which Donald Trump convinces his supporters that his lies are really self-proclaimed truths, I’m not surprised that millions of Americans and certainly a majority of gun owners agree with the nonsense that the NRA and like-minded sycophants continue to spread about the benefits of owning a gun.  But physicians do not have the luxury of developing treatment guidelines for medical conditions based on what their patients might want to believe. When research indicates repeatedly that a certain type of behavior creates medical risk, then medical professionals must respond on that basis and that basis alone, regardless of what people who sell guns for a living would like their customers to believe.

Which is why the new article by Garen Wintemute is so important because what he and his research associates are trying to do is develop a practical method to communicate concerns about gun risk to patients who might be predisposed to reject or be skeptical about what their physician tells them about guns.  Their initial article, published last August, discussed the need for physicians to acquire a higher level of ‘cultural competence’ in order to communicate effectively with gun-owning patients; in particular calling on gun-owning physicians to provide leadership in developing messaging that gun-owning patients would more likely understand.

But adopting a respectful and supportive toward a patient with a different cultural outlook is one thing; knowing what has to be communicated from a clinical perspective is something else.  And Wintemute’s group has now taken that step by publishing a new article that seeks to define what physicians should say and/or do if they believe that a patient’s access to guns creates a medical risk.  Aligning proper responses to different levels of medical risk is standard procedure for nearly all public health issues, particularly those issues, like gun violence, that have been listed as public health concerns for more than twenty years.  But thanks to the ban on CDC gun violence research and the continuous anti-medical drumbeat of the NRA, creating proper medical messaging for gun violence has been tantamount to finding yourself in deep water without a paddle or even a canoe.

The medical profession needs to ignore the NRA and self-aggrandizing politicians who cynically use their opposition to the concept of gun violence as a medical risk to inflame their base.  After all, Galileo spent the last nine years of his life under arrest, but when we drop a solid object, it still falls straight down.

 

There’s Still Plenty Of Wilderness In The Lower 48: Just Use Your Imagination.

Elkhorn Ranch courtesy Sean Palfrey

In 1883, then 25-year old Theodore Roosevelt went out to the western edge of North Dakota to fulfill his dream of shooting a trophy buffalo and bringing the mounted head back to his home in New York.  Roosevelt had been interested in nature and natural environments since he was a little boy and his affinity for the outdoors was eagerly encouraged by his father, Theodore Sr., who was one of the founders of the New York’s American Museum of Natural History in 1869. By the time he was a teenager, Roosevelt had trecked through much of the Adirondacks and journeyed through Europe and Egypt collecting specimens of all kinds, but the trip to the West in 1883 marked the first time that Roosevelt actually immersed himself in what was still wilderness lands.

Actually, the wilderness that Roosevelt hunted through in 1883 was, in reality, almost gone.  The transcontinental railroad linked both coasts since 1869, the Plains Indians were more or less pacified by 1877 (and slaughtered at Wounded Knee in 1890), and the U.S. Census announced that there were between 6 and 20 people living on every square mile of land in at least half the land mass of the lower 48.  Which meant that the wilderness, as far as the U.S. government was concerned, was gone.

TR was keenly aware of these changes, partly because he knew that it wouldn’t be much longer until animals like the American bison would be gone for evermore; but he was also a man of his times who believed that the frontier represented a remarkable resource for nation-building, both in economic and cultural terms.  In many respects, his comments sprinkled through his writings about the virtues of living on the frontier, presaged the single, most important essay ever written about the development of America, namely, Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘Frontier Thesis,” published in 1894.  In this essay, the author described America as being uniquely different from Europe insofar as the social, economic and legal institutions brought over from the Old World were not the same institutions that were developing as the country moved West.  In this latter space, basically the land between the Missouri River and the western coast, America was developing a new brand of institutions, a new culture, a new organizational ethos that reflected the egalitarianism and independence of the frontier.

Not only did Turner and Roosevelt know each other’s works, but Roosevelt used Turner’s ideas to sell his notions about conservation and nature to skeptical politicians whose support he needed to promote and develop what later became our present-day system of natural monuments, including national historic sites, national preserves and reservations and, the greatest treasure of all, the national parks. The law that TR signed in 1906 gave the President the right to designate “historical landmarks, historic preservation structures and other objects of scientific interest,” which today represents 12% of the protected landscape in the entire world.  That’s not bad considering that the U.S. occupies 6% of the globe’s land mass.

The reason I find TR so fascinating is that all of this interest and concern about preserving nature grew out of his desire to go into natural places in order to hunt big game.  Which is something which a visitor can still feel by visiting what remains of TR’s Elkhorn ranch.  The property lies midway between the two branches of the national park named after our 26th President, and while the ranch house itself has not been preserved, you can stand where TR stood in front of the house and look over the Badlands the same way that Sean Palfrey looked over the Badlands when he took the photo which adorns this page. And then bed down for the evening, watch the stars come out, and wait for the first slivers of daylight to brighten the sky behind the buttes overlooking the ranch.  And maybe if you are quiet enough, a few of the bison who once again claim this area as their home will amble by.  It may not be wilderness in the technical sense, but it’s as good as you’ll ever get.

 

There’s A Ballot Initiative Coming To California And The NRA Better Watch Out.

Everybody knows that the United States was formed by settlers who moved from East to West. But whether it’s Ronald Reagan or Half-n-Half, what starts in California usually then moves back East.  Which is why when a citizen’s ballot initiative to limit magazine capacities and ammunition sales in California was first announced back in January, the NRA threw an especially big fit because they know that if this kind of measure can be passed in our most populous state, then gun-control legislation can pop up anywhere and no amount of Capitol Hill noisemaking can necessarily hold the line against such reforms.

           The California initiative is particularly interesting because, for the first time, it is aimed (no pun intended) not just at the regulation of guns, but the regulation of ammunition as well. And for all the talk about gun violence on both sides, what is rarely mentioned is the fact that while gun ownership is more or less regulated in all 50 states, the control of ammunition is usually left entirely undone.  For example, despite a strongly-held belief among many GVP advocates to the contrary, most internet gun sales involve a background check before the buyer can actually take possession of the gun.  But in most states that same buyer can purchase an armory-full load of ammunition for that same weapon and there is no requirement that such purchases be tracked or reported at all.  The Aurora shooter, James Holmes, for example, amassed a stash of more than 6,000 rounds, much of it bought online.

To a certain degree the California initiative follows from ordinances that were passed in Los Angeles and Sacramento which require that ammunition purchasers identify themselves in face-to-face transactions with ammunition sellers, and that the latter keep records of everyone to whom they have made a sale.  The problem, of course, is that these laws are only useful to law enforcement engaged in an investigation after-the-fact; they really don’t do much to prevent ammunition from getting into the wrong hands before it’s used in an improper way.   The new ballot initiative, known as “The Safety For All Act,” would require a background check for all ammunition sales, making California the first state to impose the same requirement for ammunition purchases that exist for the purchase of guns.

Frankly, if I were the NRA, I’d be freaking out too.  And I would be particularly freaking out right now because the folks who are spearheading the effort to put this issue on the ballot have just announced that they have collected the necessary 365,880 signatures to put the item before statewide voters this Fall. Actually, they are going to submit over 600,000 signatures, because like all citizen initiative campaigns, signatures on a petition are one thing, valid signatures are something else.  But I get the clear sense that putting this issue before the voters come November is really a done deal.

You know, of course, that the NRA will pull out all the usual 2nd-Amendment stops to try and defeat this bill, but in a funny kind of way they are hoisted by their own petard.  Because the NRA doesn’t let a single day go by without reminding the world that they represent the most law-abiding citizens on God’s green earth; namely, the folks who under law (a law that was supported by the NRA) are allowed to own guns.  So if the government imposes the same legal requirements on ammo that it imposes on guns, why should any good-guy citizen (or non-citizen, for that matter) have a problem with this law?

This ballot initiative is also going to test one other, heartfelt NRA argument, namely their self-promoting nonsense that they are a true, grass-roots movement whereas the other side is an artificial creation of Mayor Mike and his big bucks. Let’s see how that one flies in the Golden State – it sure didn’t work when I-594 was passed in a state right up Interstate 5.

Why Don’t We Make The 2016 Election A National Plebiscite On Guns?

So Hillary’s beginning to look around for a VP and, not without good reason, the names of some other women have come into view, the most prominent of course being Liz Warren. I say ‘of course’ because this trial balloon is probably being floated by the folks who want to make sure that Bernie’s most ardent supporters don’t bolt and run during the Fall election.  Like where are they going to go?  To Ralph Nader?

            Anyway, I think with all due respect to the gender warriors (said positively, btw) that what Hillary really needs to do is forget about balancing her ticket by using the traditional methodologies like geography, class, so on and so forth, and instead think about issues, in particular the one issue which gave her campaign a real boost, namely, the issue of guns.  Because you may recall that when Hillary raised the gun issue in no uncertain terms, the media (as well as her campaign) described the move as an attempt to exploit a chink in Bernie’s alleged left-wing view of things, but I saw it as something else.

And what I saw it as was the very first response by any Democrat to what had been, and continues to be an endless barrage of “I Love The 2nd Amendment” crap from Trump and the other Republican presidential phonies all the way down the line. This nonsense started the day after two television journalists were killed in Virginia on August 26, 2015 when the Shlump said that it “wasn’t a gun problem” and went on to support the notion that armed civilians made Americans safe from crime.  He then began working the most strident calls for 2nd Amendment ‘rights’ into all his KKK rallies and issued a white paper extolling the virtues of law-abiding gun owners, whereupon all the other Republican presidential weasels followed suit. Remember when Marco Rubio picked up a free gun at Ruger?

Hillary’s decision to go big-time on the gun issue started in the aftermath of the Umpqua shooting on October 1, 2015. And she took it right to the Republicans the very next day in a Florida speech when she said “we need to build a movement” to counter the strength of the NRA.  She made it clear that she was going to attack Republicans on this issue, and she has continued to push a strong GVP agenda ever since.  To quote from her website: “comprehensive background checks, cracking down on illegal gun traffickers, holding dealers and manufacturers accountable when they endanger Americans, and keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers and stalkers.” Not a bad list.

And not only is it a good list, but all those issues happen to be supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans, support which cuts across all demographic lines and includes gun owners as well. It also turns out, incidentally, that in all surveys that ask people whether they feel safer with a gun, women consistently score higher than men in believing that gun access puts people at risk.  Women also score higher than men on wanting more gun regulations, with the most recent Pew poll showing 57% of women expressing the need for more gun regulations, as opposed to only 37% of males.

So here we have a significant gender difference on the issue which most clearly differentiates Hillary from the ‘presumptive’ Republican nominee, and one which I believe could be best exploited by bringing to the Democratic ticket another woman whose experience, crowd appeal and media savvy would dramatically overwhelm any Trump-ish attempt to further exploit NRA-engendered fears about the loss of 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’  Because the truth is that what I want to see is a national plebiscite that will really test, once and for all, the alleged American love affair with guns.  So I got an idea. We need a woman who can drive home the GVP message.  I haven’t discussed this with her, but why don’t we draft Shannon Watts?

What’s The Difference Between The Victims And Perpetrators Of Gun Violence? Not Much.

If you hang around the GVP community, you quickly memorize certain numbers: 30,000, which is the number of people killed each year by guns, although the real number is a couple of thousand more; 65,000, which is the number of people who are injured when someone else shoots them with a gun but they survive; 15,000, which is the number (give or take another thousand) who injure themselves each year with a gun; 2,000, which covers the ones who kill themselves or are shot dead by the police. Put it all together and you come up with roughly 115,000 Americans who are the victims of gun violence each and every year.

I actually think the annual number of gun violence victims is somewhere above 200,000, because as far as I am concerned, the people who aim the gun at someone other than themselves and pull the trigger are victims of gun violence too. We never think of the shooters as victims because, by definition, all of them used their gun to commit at least one crime, namely, aggravated assault or homicide with a gun.  And in our fractured world, if every crime has a victim, there also has to be a perpetrator, hence by definition, the shooter can’t also be a victim.  But in fact, he is.

Why do I say that?  First of all, most gun assaults are committed by people, usually young men, for whom violence, and particularly gun violence, is part and parcel of their daily lives.  Want to know who comes into the ER most frequently with a gun injury?  Someone who was previously arrested on suspicion of using a gun.  Okay. I know, I know, the cops usually arrest the first ‘bad guy’ they find. But if you don’t think that the average street shooter isn’t going after someone who previously went after him, then you don’t know much about the streets or the shootings that take place in the streets.  And when the victim of a shooting happens to be a female, the shooter is almost always some jerk of a boyfriend or husband who has previously belted her around numerous times, and maybe on occasion she defended herself by belting back.

Now we know just about everything there is to know about the victims who get shot with guns.  We know their age, their race, where they live, what they were doing when the gun went off, between the CDC and the FBI there isn’t much that escapes the eye.  And when we come to the shooters, even though many of them don’t get arrested, enough sooner or later wind up in detention so that we can get a pretty good idea about their demographics as well.

But here’s what we don’t know.  We have absolutely no idea why someone picks up a gun, points it at someone else and – boom! – it goes off.  And it doesn’t work to say that so-and-so used a gun because he came from a violent background or had a violent history, because most of the young men with that profile who want to commit a violent act do so without using a gun.  According to the Department of Justice, less than 7% of all serious criminal events involve the use of guns.  So how and why do the other 93% figure out how to commit violence without using a gun?

Those 7% who express anger and violence with a gun may not be victims of gun violence in a legal sense, but in terms of the impact of violence on their lives they are GVP victims just as well.  Because as Konrad Lorenz points out, anger and aggression can and should be used as tools to advance the social good. But those who cannot differentiate between the positive and negative uses of aggression will sooner or later end up alienated and marginalized by the community as a whole. And most will live shorter and more painful lives.

Why Don’t We End Gun Violence? Because We Don’t Experience It.

This year roughly 110,000 Americans will be killed or seriously injured with guns. And this is often referred to as an ‘epidemic’ of gun violence for which a solution has yet to be found.  But epidemics, like the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, have a beginning and an end. In the case of gun violence, to quote the brilliant insight of Dr. Katherine Christoffel, gun violence is “endemic” because it just goes on year after year after year.

How does an otherwise basically law-abiding, civil society let this kind of human carnage go on without being able to develop or even talk about developing a basic consensus on bringing this problem to an end? The usual response is that a small but determined coterie of special-interest groups led by the NRA and the NSSF have managed to stymie any serious efforts at political reforms and without changes in public policy, the overwhelming and continuous human toll from guns will continue without change.

           To me, this is a rather facile argument which takes an obvious answer and turns it into an unquestioned formula to be trotted out by every GVP organization and advocate whenever they are asked to explain why their efforts to promote sensible gun regulations come up short.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the NRA and its acolytes in and out of politics don’t deserve their share of the blame. What I am saying, however, is that the failure of this country to respond properly to gun violence goes far deeper than simply assigning blame to the folks who own the guns.

When Black Lives Matter sprung up after the murder of Trayvon Martin, the focus was, and continues to be on “broadening the conversation around state violence to include all of the ways in which Black people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state.”  As regards gun violence, this conversation focuses on gun violence perpetrated by police against residents of the African-American community, of which there have been far too many instances over the last several years. Left unsaid is the degree to which gun violence committed by civilians against other civilians is also a feature of African-American life, with numbers and rates of gun homicides being seven or eight times higher among blacks then among whites.

Of course the GCP community, including African-American community leadership has an immediate answer to deal with this problem, namely, keep the guns out of the ‘wrong’ hands.  Which takes us right back to where we started, namely, the ability of the NRA camp to prevent sensible public policy reforms aimed at keeping guns out of the ‘wrong hands.’  No wonder we get nowhere fast.

Take a look at the racial breakdown for all causes of death for the age brackets 15 – 34.  From a gun-violence perspective, this is the killing zone par excellence, with black gun homicides accounting for two-thirds of all gun deaths whereas blacks are, at best, 15% of the overall population in this age bracket. The number cause of death in this age group is unintentional injuries and the numbers are: whites – 24,211; blacks – 3,488.  Second highest cause of death is suicide: whites 9,811; blacks – 1,111. Next highest is medical neoplasms (cancer): whites – 3,980; blacks – 901. Gun death victims aren’t just overwhelmingly African-American; it is the only cause of death in which the racial breakdown doesn’t more or less match the racial composition of society as a whole.

Want to know the real reason why we continue to put up with this obscene event known as gun violence?  Because more whites don’t get killed.  The Viet-Nam War ended because CBS News started flashing the body count on its national news every night, and those were American bodies and, loose talk to the contrary, most (85%) of those bodies were white. I’m not advocating killing or injuring anyone with guns; I’m saying that most of us don’t experience gun violence at all.

Once Again The ATF Celebrates Much Ado About Nothing.

It’s been a quiet few days in the gun violence world.  According to our friends at the Gun Violence Archive, since Friday there have only been 200+ shootings resulting in 59 deaths and 144 injuries, what Ralph on The Honeymooners would call a “mere bag of shells.”  But I was rescued by the ATF which issued a press release touting the work of its National Tracing Center (NTC) in tracing guns picked up overseas in the Caribbean, Mexico, Canada and several Central American countries.  To quote the ATF: “Firearm trace data provides valuable investigative leads and specific trend data for our international partners.” Maybe some Mexican police agency will ask the ATF to trace one of the AK-47’s that the ATF shipped to Mexico between 2006 and 2011, of which at least one thousand are still floating around.

           The truth is that the ATF does very little to fight illegal guns except pat itself on the back.  And one of its most common back-patting activities involves the tracing of so-called ‘crime’ guns.  The ATF has been promoting its prowess in gun tracing since the licensing of commercial firearms sales was placed under its jurisdiction by the Gun Control Act of 1968.  And over the years, this tracing activity has yielded, according to the ATF, “critically important information” about the origins of millions of ‘crime’ guns.  In 2014, the ATF was able to identify the origin of 174,000 guns – do the arithmetic as Bill Clinton would say, and that adds up to at least a couple of million guns over the last forty-seven years.

The ATF has used this miasma of data to promote to build a basic argument about the commerce in crime guns.  I am referring to the notion, repeated ad nauseum by every GVP activist group and GVP-leaning politician, that gun ‘trafficking,’ (i.e., the illegal movement of guns from one location to another) is a major factor in gun violence and needs to be curbed. So I looked at the ATF report which, based on the data generated by the NTC, details the origin of all the traced guns in Massachusetts, which is where I happen to live.  In 2014, the NTC was asked to run 1,538 traces of which they could only identify the origin of 979 guns. Of those 979 guns, it turns out that 676 were initially purchased in MA and the surrounding, contiguous states.  And all those guns that get trafficked up the I-95 ‘pipeline?’  They accounted for roughly 15% of guns traced in MA. Gee, what a surprise that most of the crime guns in my state came from places which are. at most, a half-hour’s car ride away.

Of course the ATF says they are hamstrung in their efforts to do even more in their unrelenting battle against gun trafficking because they can’t look at how guns move from hand to hand since they can only check a dealer’s gun log which records the very first sale. And this lie is then innocently repeated by GVP advocates who really do want to see an end to the traffic in illegal guns. And why is it a lie? Because the ATF just issued a ruling defining how dealers can keep their records of acquisitions and sales electronically, which means the ATF can easily find out not just the first time that a gun was sold, but every time it was sold in a gun shop. And guess what? In my shop upwards of 40% of my guns were used, and these used guns had previously been sold by me or by some other dealer down the road.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how to search an Excel spreadsheet by any unique identifier and thus gain a much clearer picture on the history of a gun picked up at the scene if a crime. The boys in Fairfax must get a good laugh when they consider the behavior of the agency that regulates guns.