Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 91

Should Doctors Stop Talking About Gun Violence Because Medical Errors Cause More Deaths? No.

Gun Nation is abuzz with the publication of an article in the British Medical Journal which finds an alarmingly high rate of U.S. hospital deaths due to medical errors.  Now why would the pro-gun noise machine care one way or the other about an article in a medical journal?  Because it’s been an article of faith amongst the gun faithful that physicians should stop wasting their time talking about gun violence when the number of people killed each year by firearms is just a fraction of the number who die due to medical mistakes.  And since the BMJ article states that medical errors account for anywhere between 200,000 and 400,000 avoidable deaths each year, and annual gun homicides only count around 11,000, why can’t doctors take care of really ill patients properly before they start making so much fuss about guns?

           Marion Hammer, former NRA President who spearheaded Docs versus Glocks in Florida, says that docs should “do no harm” and keep their political opinions out of the examining room.  And in pushing for the gag law, Hammer distributed a document that listed ‘medical misadventures’ as three times more likely to result in deaths than accidental shootings.  Other sources, like media that promote natural healing, paint an even grimmer picture, with one expose claiming that guns kill 31,940 Americans each year (homicide/suicide/accidents) but the medical system accounts for783,936 deaths! By the way, this particular website also published a story that said the San Bernardino shooting had all the “signs” of a staged government operation, and this story rolled out more than 31,000 times.  Hmmmmm.

The problem is that the British Medical Journal isn’t an adjunct of the Area 51 gang, so when they publish something about morbidity from medical errors, it needs to be taken seriously, particularly if what they say ends up being injected one way or another into the gun violence debate.  Now let me make it clear that I’m not a physician and I have no medical training of any kind.  But I know how to read the King’s English and I can figure out whether data in a peer-reviewed journal aligns with the facts and conclusions on which the article is based.  In the case of the BMJ, I not only read the article detailing mortality rates from medical errors in U.S. hospitals, I also closely read the articles on which the BMJ article was based. Let’s start first with the BMJ.

In 2013, 611,000 Americans died from heart disease, 585,000 died from cancer and 251,000 died from medical error, this last being the third most common cause of death.  Since the medical profession doesn’t actually have specific medical errors as coded events in the ICD-10 coding system used almost universally as the primary indicator of health, the figure noted above is a best-guess estimate based on specific studies of in-patient outcomes throughout the U.S. The most comprehensive study from Medicare records, gave the total mortality for doctor errors as slightly more than 195,000 per year from 2000 through 2002, of which 75% of all deaths were attributed to something known as ‘failure to rescue,’ which means a diagnostic error leading to improper (or no) treatment, leading to the patient’s death.

But failure to rescue in a clinical context may have little, if anything to do with decisions made by physicians themselves. Many such deaths are attributable to mistakes in managing patient information, particularly for elderly patients who tend to suffer from multiple conditions requiring intensive and complicated care. A necessary treatment is omitted or delayed, vital signs begin to decompose, the patient is dying but his physician may be far removed from the scene.

To compare the ‘responsibility’ of physicians for patient deaths to the ‘responsibility’ of a gun owner who lets his gun get into the wrong hands, is to make a comparison with no basis in fact. But since when did Gun Nation respond to the issue of gun violence with any facts at all?

 

Is The Obama Gun Surge Finished? I’m Not So Sure.

Mark Twain once said, “the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” and for those in the GVP who might take some comfort in the idea that the great gun surge under Obama is finally coming to an end, Twain’s missive might apply here as well.  Because despite a recent tumble in the value of Smith & Wesson stock and a collapse in the prices of AR-15 assault rifles, the NICS background check numbers are singing a different tune.

          Now hold the presses!  After all, according to The Trace, the FBI has just announced that NICS checks in April dropped 16% from the previous month, from 2.5 million checks down to 2.1 million. And the latter figure represents a drop of 35% in NCS checks since the high water-mark of 3.3 million checks was hit in December, 2015. So in the face of those numbers, how can I sit here and tell you that gun sales are still strong?

Answer: Because numbers from NICS have to be understood for what they really are.  First and foremost, the monthly number of NICS checks announced by the FBI is anywhere between 30% and 50% higher than the NICS checks that occur when a gun is transferred or sold.  The NICS system is used by states that want to check the validity of licenses to own or carry guns, a NICS background check is also performed every time someone walks into a pawn shop and redeems one of their own guns. Of the 2.5 million checks conducted in March, 2016, more than 1.2 million involved something other than the sale of a gun.

If you go back to December, 2012, the month that shattered all previous months for gun sales due to a combination of Obama’s re-election and the tragedy at Sandy Hook, handgun and long gun NICS checks that month reached more than 2 million, while license checks were one-quarter of that total, and nearly half of all license checks came from Kentucky, which alone of the 50 states submits all resident gun licenses for a background check every month. Kentucky’s license checks now run more about 300,000 every month, but license checks for the entire country are now in excess of 1 million monthly, which is a much greater increase than anything having to do with the sale of guns.

If we assume, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t, that regulating guns as a response to gun violence starts with vetting the qualifications of everyone who owns a gun, then the growth in NICS license checks is a positive step in that direction and should not be ignored.  At the same time, using the FBI’s number of total NICS checks to judge the gun industry’s health or lack thereof doesn’t necessarily work.  Yes, NICS checks for guns did, in fact, decline by 15% from March to April of this year, but handgun checks comparing April, 2015 to April, 2016, went up by the same amount.

Yesterday I received an email from Chris Cox asking me to sign a petition demanding that President Obama stop his anti-gun executive actions NOW!  The email says that we (gun owners) are in the “fight of our lives” because Obama intends to go around Congress and unilaterally take away our guns.  I’ve been getting the same email from the NRA for the past twenty years, and while it doesn’t necessarily motivate me to go out and buy another gun, that’s only because I own about ten times more guns than I actually need.

Come to think of it, I don’t really need any of the four Glocks, two Colts, five Smiths and two Walther pistols (among other guns) that I currently own. I just like guns. And if I walk into a gun shop today and see another banger that I like, I’ll happily submit to a NICS check in order to own that gun. And that holds true for every other gun nut who walks into a shop.

Should Brady Be Criticized For Running An Ad That Shows Pics Of Mass Shooters And Their Victims?

An argument broke out in the GVP community concerning an advertisement put out by the Brady organization, which shows images of mass shooters, Adam Lanza and James Holmes, along with pictures of shooting victims and permits viewers to download a Google app that erases the names and images of mass shooters from online media “out of respect for the victims.” The ad sparked an outcry leading to the posting of an online petition that asked Brady to withdraw their ad campaign.  As of this morning, the petition collected 120 names.

Evidently the Brady message sparked anger on the part of people who are invested in trying to absorb the emotions involved in losing a loved one in a mass shooting. Reuters quoted a Los Angeles-based entertainment writer who lost a cousin in the Aurora movie shooting; another online media outlet got a similar reaction from Tom Teves who lost his son at Aurora and then started an organization, No Notoriety, whose media consultant just happens to be the Los Angeles PR lady quoted by Reuters above.

Now don’t get me wrong.  Nobody should try and capitalize by exploiting the grief of others, and in the age of instant journalism fostered by the internet, disclosure rules that used to govern old-style journalism should still apply. But without in any way calling into question the motives or views of people who suffer daily from wanton acts of gun violence, there are two issues here that need to be addressed.

First is the general issue of how guns and gun violence are depicted by those individuals and organizations who seek to find solutions to the carnage which continues to claim 30,000+ lives every year.  Personally, I have always found it unsettling that whenever the media talks about gun violence, the actual images which prove just how fearsome guns can be are sanitized to a degree that basically renders the argument moot.  Take a look, for example, at the illustration which accompanied the Reuters story quoted above. And this pic is typical of what accompanies virtually all GVP media stories on gun violence; if you don’t believe me, take a look at this story from NPR. Let’s not forget that a majority of Americans now believe that someone walking around with a gun is safer than not having a gun.  I don’t think it would be such a terrible thing to show these folks the damage that a gun can really do.

Getting back to Brady, I also want to raise a specific issue regarding the petition that is collecting signatures condemning their ad. The petition is hosted by an outfit, change.org, whose name sounds very much like the type of website that hosts stories and promotes activities for people and organizations with a progressive point of view.  And in fact the website claims to “reach the world’s largest socially engaged audience.”  Now what could be more progressive and more dedicated to good things than that?

But a funny thing happens when you take the time to actually examine some of the petitions that are hosted on this site, in particular, petitions about guns.  You’ll find all kinds of petitions asking Obama to do this and that for gun safety, along with petitions for keeping guns off various college campuses, extending background checks to private sales, blah, blah and blah.  You’ll also find a petition promoting open carry in Florida, which has gained more than 20,000 signatures, and another petition (ready for this one?) that has garnered more than 5,000 signatures, telling Congress to abolish the NFA.  Which happens to be the law regulating the private ownership of machine guns! Imagine what would have happened if Adam Lanza could have walked into Sandy Hook Elementary with a full-auto gun.

I’m not saying that people who spoke out against the Brady ad should be criticized for mounting a petition on a website that hosts petitions asking to make it easier for Americans to get killed with guns. But perhaps the GVP community should be a little more solicitous of the company they keep.

 

Do We Always Need To Use Violence To Get What We Want? Dandy The Chimp Shows Us Another Way.

In a brilliant and spellbinding book, Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are, Frans De Waal describes an experiment in which a bunch of chimpanzees walked over some partially-hidden grapefruits and then later in the afternoon when the group were dozing off in the trees, one of the chimps, Dandy, made a beeline back to the grapefruits and devoured every one.  Had this chimp tried to eat one of the grapefruits when the other chimps were around he probably would have been able, at best, to eat one or two.  But by developing a strategy that avoided confrontation with the other chimps he was able to reap a much greater reward.

           I was reminded of this story by a report (thank you MH) about an 11-year old boy in Alabama who picked up a 9mm pistol and shot someone who had ‘invaded’ his home.  Now the whole episode still remains to be sorted out, but in fact the kid didn’t shoot the intruder because otherwise he would have been hurt, he fired his gun as the ‘bad guy’ was trying to jump over a back-yard fence and run away. The teen-age shooter’s mother said she didn’t know the identity of the burglar, but he had burglarized their home before. Huh?

It turns out that 22 states, including Alabama, have passed “Stand Your Ground” laws in the last ten years, although of late there have been some attempts to revise or scale back the extent of such laws.  But basically such a law gives an individual the right to use deadly force, not just in their home, but in just about any circumstances where they believe that otherwise they might be harmed or killed.  And the problem with such laws is that it may be used as a defense in the case cited above, even though the youngster shot someone who was running away.

As you might suspect, states with this law have experienced a substantial increase in justifiable homicides, even while the overall homicide rate continues to slowly dwindle down.  A report issued by our friends at Everytown found a 53% increase in justifiable homicides in states where STG laws were enacted, with a doubling of that number where the victims of justified murders were black.  Gee, what a surprise that violence, even state-sanctioned violence falls disproportionately on the shoulders of African-American men.

So there are two problems, it seems to me, with these laws.  First, the laws place the burden of proving that the homicide was not justifiable on the individuals least likely to be able to defend themselves in court because they just happen to be dead. But second, and more important, is the idea that we are justifying and embracing a form of behavior that rewards people for not trying to avoid confrontations and, if anything, for taking what might have been a brief and otherwise harmless difference of opinion and escalating it into a deadly and ultimately lethal fight. And what is the mechanism that always, in the classic words of Lester Adelson, “converts a spat into a slaying and a quarrel into a killing?“  A gun.

Now at this point if you want to send me a snarky email about your God-given right to defend yourself against criminals, terrorists or Hillary Clinton, save yourself some time.  The purpose of this comment is to provoke discussion among people who are genuinely concerned about America’s seeming infatuation with refusing to back down; refusing to find another, non-violent way; refusing to acknowledge the possibility that a non-confrontational response to a threat may, in fact, yield better results.

Which brings me back to Dandy the chimp who realized he had a choice between fighting with the other chimps over who would eat the grapefruits as opposed to waiting until he was alone and could eat all the fruit himself.  Now maybe if Dandy had a Glock he wouldn’t have needed to wait.  But if he had a Glock, another chimp doubtless would have owned a Ruger or a Smith.  Then what?

 

Are Safe Guns Finally Here? The President Just Gave Them A Big Push.

The man who still lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has just unveiled his plan to move forward with ‘smart gun’ technology, and while the Devil is always in the details and I’m not sure that all the details have been worked out, some of the hurdles that previously stymied the development of smart guns seem to have been anticipated and overcome.

The idea of electronically preventing someone other than the qualified owner from using a gun has been floating around for more than twenty years, but a combination of gun industry resistance, the usual bureaucratic inertia and consumer disinterest has kept this stuff on the back shelf. The biggest issue is not whether the technology works per se, but whether a workable ‘smart’ technology can be added to a gun without seriously impacting the retail price. I have heard different numbers from various ‘smart gun’ inventors and entrepreneurs, but all I know is that the one market-ready gun, the Armatix iP1, has a retail tag in excess of $1,600; in other words, fuggedaboutit.

The Obama plan surmounts this problem somewhat by approaching the entire issue from the perspective of developing a new law-enforcement technology and using federal funds both to help develop the product as well as to subsidize police agencies that might then adopt the gun.  The good news is that the civilian gun market is very much influenced by what the cops carry and buy, the bad news is that a subsidized police price doesn’t necessarily translate into an over-the-counter deal that will being gunnies into to my shop.

Leaving that issue aside for the moment, what impresses me most of all about this plan is the decision to create a bone-fide procurement process that reminds me of when the Army junked the Colt 1911 pistol back in the mid-70’s and went to the Beretta M9. First they figured out what they wanted, then they issued an RFP, then they ran a proof test to make sure that submitted guns actually met the design requirements and worked, then they got serious and did the requisite torture tests at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds to validate that the gun wouldn’t fall apart after it was shot thousands of times, dropped into water and sand, in other words replicating what happens to any military weapon that is carried in the field.

From what I can see in the White House report, a similar plan has been developed for smart guns, which will have to get through two test phases before the technology is considered to work. Entry requirements for the competition, however, do not specify what type of gun is permitted, nor the caliber of ammunition. Nor has the NIJ published the pass-fail criteria for the second and much more rigorous test phase.  So this initiative is still focused on testing the technology rather than testing a specific gun that might be adopted by law enforcement agencies. The “baseline requirements” for such a weapon (or weapons) will be determined following the Phase 2 test results.

If a technology exists that will meet the rigorous performance criteria that will no doubt be adopted, I am sure that we will see some product being carried by a few cops on a provisional basis by the end of the year.  But if the purpose of smart guns is to diminish gun accidents caused by an unqualified individual grabbing a gun, the number of such shootings involving law enforcement personnel is a tiny fraction of the accidental civilian shootings that take place every year. Which means that the issue of commercial market penetration must still be addressed.

On the other hand, it was nice to see the NRA’s positive response to this report which I quote: “At a time when we are actively fighting terrorists at home and abroad, this administration would rather focus the military’s efforts on the president’s gun control agenda.”  Now when do you think the NRA wrote that one?

Don’t Miss This Important Report On Gun Violence.

A serious and substantial report on gun violence and minority communities has just been issued by the Joyce Foundation, the Urban Institute and The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, accompanied by a national survey conducted by the Benenson Strategy Group. Is there any crossover between the fact that Joel Benenson happens to be a leading consultant for Hillary who just happens to have made gun violence a central plank of her Presidential campaign?

           This effort largely reflects meetings held with more than 100 members of minority communities in Stockton, CA, Milwaukee, WI and Richmond, VA, in an attempt to create a new strategy to deal with gun violence which, as the report points out, is the first and second leading cause of death respectively for Black and Hispanic males, ages 15-34.

Much of the discussions held with community representatives, along with a majority of the report’s content, deals with relations between minority residents and the police.  And this should hardly surprise, given the fact that the types of gun violence examined in this report all happen to be crimes.  Of the report’s four categories of recommendations, only one category – Improve Relations Between Police and Communities of Color – yielded more than two basic recommendations because, as the report says, “police must be viewed as a legitimate authority in the communities they serve.”

The Benenson survey casts some doubt on whether minorities believe that cops riding down their streets represent any legitimacy at all.  Benenson found that a majority of Blacks and a third of Hispanics reported having a ‘negative interaction’ with law enforcement, although there still was overwhelming support for the idea that, on the whole, most cops were professionals with a few ‘rotten apples’ giving police a bad name.

In tandem with its publication was a public event at the National Press Club featuring an analysis of the survey by Joel Benenson, along with a roundtable discussion involving researchers and activists who contributed to the report.  What I found most interesting about this discussion was the conviction on the part of all participants that successful implementation of the recommendations for reducing gun violence would require giving ‘everyone’ a seat at the table whenever new policies or programs would be discussed.

Which got me thinking: How come there was nobody at the National Press Club representing the folks who always have the most to say about gun violence, namely, the folks who represent the sector that is wholly and completely responsible for all gun violence, namely, the folks who make the guns?  Because the truth is there would be no gun violence, not one, single, solitary gun injury if the gun industry hadn’t convinced Congress and the Supreme Court that guns were legal commerce and should be allowed in every home.  And by the way, the Benenson survey discovered once again that even in minority neighborhoods that are racked by gun violence, a majority of residents believe they would be safer if they owned a gun.

Now just wait until the NRA-ILA gets its hands on that one! I can see the headline now: Hillary’s pollster admits that minorities need to own guns. What if this report had been authored, say, by the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, funded by the Scaife Foundation which supports every cockamamie right-wing policy idea?  The report would have denied the existence of gun violence, would have chastised minority communities for not keeping their kids under control, would have trotted out Detroit’s Police Chief who believes the most effective way to deal with gun violence is to make sure that every citizen is armed.

I believe there should be a seat at the table for everyone who needs to be present in a discussion about gun violence.  But just understand that several of the chairs won’t be filled no matter how many invitations go out. And I’m still waiting for the report that explains how we are going to deal with that bunch.

 

 

 

Maybe We Need To Understand Gun Ownership From A Scientific Point Of View.

Why do Americans own 300 million guns?  Building a civilian arsenal of that size really is an extraordinary achievement, particularly when you consider that the U.S. counts for roughly 5% of the world’s population but together we own maybe one-third of all civilian small arms in the world, maybe almost half the number of handguns and long guns that exist on the entire planet.

Now if you go to the so-called experts on gun ownership, the NRA and the other gun-marketing organizations, they’ll tell you that guns have ‘always’ been part of American history and that God plus the Founding Fathers gave us the uncontested ‘right’ to protect ourselves with guns.

          Actually, like all good marketing slogans, this one has a bit of truth to it but it’s mostly hyperbole.  In fact, early colonial governments enacted gun-control laws to make sure that the guns which the colonists needed for hunting didn’t wind up in the ‘wrong hands,’ i.e., the Injuns.  And later on, when Roy Rogers and Gene Autry opened up the West, most frontier towns also enacted strong gun-control laws to keep things under control.

But until 1890, when the government announced that the ‘frontier’ was dead and gone, it was presumed that if you lived outside of a city, you needed a gun in order to secure necessary food for the table.  But the problem was that hunters had been so adept at bagging game that many of the animals whose meat had filled American stomachs were no longer to be found.  The white-tail deer were disappearing throughout the East, the bison was just about extinct, the huge flocks of carrier pigeons that had darkened the skies had disappeared, altogether the balance between Man and Beast was definitely tilting towards Man.

Enter Theodore Roosevelt who, by the age of eight and living in a Manhattan townhouse, was already captivated by the idea of studying every animal specie that he could find, and the way you studied an animal was to kill it, then stuff it and preserve it, then put it on view for others to do the same.  This is the opening theme of an important new book by  Darrin Lunde, who happens to be the manager of the Smithsonian’s Division of Mammals, which happens to be one of the largest collections of animal species, a collection that was started largely through the efforts of TR.

Roosevelt happened to grow up at a time when Americans became interested in natural history, largely because the Industrial Revolution was quickly transforming much of the natural landscape along with threatening the animals, fish and plants which comprised the natural environment.  His father, Theodore Sr., founded the American Museum of Natural History in New York; Roosevelt himself became a close friend of America’s first naturalist, John Bird Grinnell; going out into the wild and hunting game in order to learn more about wild animals remained TR’s passion for his entire life.

The attempt to use the hunting experience to understand nature came to full flower for TR between 1883 and 1887 when he lived and hunted extensively on his cattle ranch, the Elkhorn, located in the North Dakota Badlands, now part of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Lunde chronicles the growing awareness on the part of Roosevelt that many of the big game animals he hunted were quickly disappearing; this awareness led to the founding of Boone & Crockett, the push for hunting regulations and the development of our national parks.

Roosevelt’s passions were hunting and guns.  But behind these two passions, and this is where Lunde’s book really stands out, was an awareness on the part of our 26th President that hunting needed to serve the interests of science, that guns were a means to advance our knowledge and appreciation of natural things.

The GVP community is uncomfortable with the notion of guns as self-defense ‘tools’ and rightly so.  But maybe a more balanced message about gun ownership could be developed by reminding Gun Nation why Teddy Roosevelt loved his guns.

Pennsylvania Was A Good Deal For Hillary And A Good Deal For GVP.

As a yellow-dog Democrat who also happens to be a gun nut, I view every election through the prism of how the gun issue will impact the vote, as well as how the vote will impact guns. Which is why I have been waiting with great anticipation for the Pennsylvania primary, because the Keystone State in many respects is a perfect mirror for projecting how the gun issue may play out come November 8.

           First, Pennsylvania is a ‘swing’ state; i.e., you don’t win it, the path to the White House gets pretty tough.  Second, the state has mucho pro-gun and anti-gun constituencies; the former living in the vast, rural swatch between Philly at one end of the state and Steel City at the other, the latter controlling the political balance of power in those two big towns. And let’s not forget that it was in Pennsylvania that our sitting President almost lost his primary campaign in 2008 because of his obsession with all those Quaker ‘clingers’ who couldn’t detach themselves from their religion or their guns.

So here we are back in Pennsylvania eight years later and this time it’s Hillary who’s getting in the face of gun owners with a promise to make guns a “voting issue” which are fighting words to the NRA.  And she’s going further than just putting herself squarely in favor of more gun control, she’s also stated explicitly in a Town Hall event the day before the primary that she wants politicians punished who follow the NRA.

This is the same Presidential candidate, by the way, who tried to position herself as a pro-gun gal when the Bomber made his ‘clinging’ statement back in 2008.  She sent letters out to rural voters wistfully recalling going on hunting trips with Dad; she backed off from a previous commitment to register handguns nationwide; she was all gun-warm and gun-cuddly in an effort to pull in Democratic votes from smaller towns.

So in a final and probably successful effort to knock Bernie out of the box, Hillary is also setting up a November confrontation with “I love the 2nd-Amendment” Donald Shlump, she’s also getting ready to turn the general election into a referendum about guns.  Which is why I couldn’t wait to see what would happen in Pennsylvania yesterday, and what happened from a GVP perspective, was a very good result.

It goes without saying that Hills won the big cities – Philly, Pittsburgh, Erie and Allentown, the latter interesting because it’s in the middle of the Lehigh Valley which has seen better days economically except that was so long ago that nobody remembers those better days. I thought the ‘left behind’ areas were prime markets for Sanders, but I n this case I was wrong.

But I was wrong about something else as well, namely, that Hillary was even competitive in some of the most gun-rich parts of the state. She won York County, for example, won it only by a couple of points, but won it nonetheless.  And York County probably has more guns than people, at least judging from the crowds that roll through the York gun show every three months.

On the dumb side, Donald Shlump won York County handily, rolling up more votes than the other two putzes combined.  But before anyone believes that Hillary is making herself vulnerable to the NRA noise machine because of her new-tough stance, the total dumb vote in all of Pennsylvania was 1,573,338, the blue vote was 1,652,863.

Now all I’ve been hearing this primary season is how the Shlump has brought all kinds of disaffected Democrats out to vote red for the first time and in some states this may have been true. But it wasn’t true yesterday in Pennsylvania, and Hillary didn’t hurt herself at all with her non-compromising statements about guns. Pennsylvania was good news for Hillary and good news for the GVP.  Come November, it may turn out that loving the 2nd Amendment won’t count for much at all.

A Remarkable GVP Event Is Being Planned And Everyone Should Come!

The very first time I drove into Boston, probably 1994 or 1995, I came towards the center of the city on the Mass. Pike and as I passed the newly-completed Prudential Center on my left, the light towers of Fenway Park loomed to my right. As I drove towards Fenway I was expecting to see the back of the Green Monster but, all of a sudden what I really saw was the huge billboard with pictures of kids who had been victims of gun violence, along with a caption that read: “15 Kids Killed Every day.”

           This remarkable public statement about gun violence, which decorated Fenway Park from 1993 until 2015 (there were actually a series of different, eye-popping murals,) was the handiwork of a Boston resident, John Rosenthal, who makes a nice living developing real estate and, by the way, he’s no Donald Shlump.  He’s an activist in gun violence, environmentalism, homelessness; in other words, he puts his money where it will really do some good.

His latest bright GVP idea is a national Concert Across America to End Gun Violence which will take place on September 25.  The concert will actually be a series of concerts taking place around the country on the same day, but the Boston event will be the anchor for the whole shebang, which is why we need to get out there, shout out there, and make it work.

I know a little bit about gun violence and about trying to prevent gun violence because I have been involved with guns, one way or another, since 1965.  And if I have learned one thing about gun violence prevention over the last fifty years, it hasn’t been an easy sell.  And the basic reason that GVP sometimes has difficulty reaching out to a wider audience is that one of our two major political parties – I’ll let you figure out which one – has decided that 110,000+ gun deaths and injuries each year is a small price to pay for unfettered and unquestioned access to guns.

Think about this for a second.  We had a big argument over whether to mandate seatbelts but nobody would dare stand up in Congress or run for President proclaiming that seat belts were a risk to health!  Yet every single Republican who entered a Presidential primary this year declared, indeed demanded that 2nd-Amendment ‘rights’ be left alone.  As if there is such a thing as a 2nd-Amendment ‘right.’ What sheer, unadulterated crap.

But the problem with the GVP community is they really are committed to an honest exchange of ideas.  So not only are they up against liars, panderers and promoters on the other side, their messages calling for safety and restraint are easily and continuously drowned out.

Which is why Rosenthal’s billboard was so different– talk about being in your face.  And now (to paraphrase Arnold) he’s ba-ack with a new GVP venture that should be a home run, because there’s nothing that gets people going, gets them talking, gets them moving like a great, big musical event and, in this case, a whole country full of musical events.

The concert is already sponsored by nearly 50 organizations from sea to shining sea, you can help organize an event if you like, be in the audience at a concert, or just tune in through one of many social media venues that will carry the activities on that special day.  The website is up, artists are committing, the whole thing is moving forward and you should be involved.  This could be another Woodstock and don’t underestimate the impact of that one event on the culture of the times.

Sign up on the website, spread the word, make your organization a sponsor, tune up your old guitar.  In 2007 Congress designated September 25 as a National Day of Remembrance for Murder Victims and let’s not forget that two-thirds of all those victims are killed each year with guns. Get it?

 

 

 

Is Gun Violence Going Up Or Going Down? A New Technology Gives Us One Answer.

If you want to fix something, the first thing you have to do is figure out what you are trying to fix. So if you are a GVP activist or supporter, obviously you want to do something about gun violence.  But how do you define ‘gun violence?’  Does it mean when someone uses a gun to hurt someone else?  Does it mean when someone uses a gun to hurt themselves?  How about when the gun was used intentionally?  Or unintentionally?

And even if you decide that ‘gun violence’ includes all those categories, the 110,000+ or so physical injuries that happen each year when the trigger of a gun is pulled may only be the tip of the iceberg.  And it’s a very large iceberg, believe me. To begin, we only count victims by the number of people who end up with a bullet in their bodies.  What about the people who witness the assault? Numerous studies support the idea that witnesses to shootings are often severely traumatized, particularly when these witnesses happen to be kids.  What about people who are threatened with a gun but luckily are able to walk away without getting shot?  This happens many more times each year than the few times that guns are used for self defense.

The problem in trying to figure out the real size of the iceberg is compounded because Gun Nation decided years ago that there’s no iceberg at all.  In fact, the truth is that guns have nothing to do with violence because it’s the people stupid, not the gun.  The gun-nut lobby is so committed to disconnecting the word ‘gun’ from the word ‘violence’ that many of them refer to guns as ‘tools,’ which has got to be about the stupidest, most pandering and meaningless description of any consumer product that has ever been produced anywhere, any time.

But let’s get back to the serious side of the issue which has been raised in an article just published by the Washington Post. The article describes a technology, ShotSpotter, which is now operating in more than 60 locations around the U.S., and basically is used by police departments to figure out how and when to deploy resources in response to spikes of violence measured by the number of guns that go off in the areas where the technology is deployed.

Guess what?  According to the data generated by ShotSpotter, gun violence went down from 2014 to 2015,  The ShotSpotter website contains a very interesting report which compares data from 2014 to 2015 in the 46 cities that deployed the technology both years. And with the exception of cities in the Midwest like Chicago and St. Louis, reports of gunfire are way down in the East and West, and even slightly lower in the South.

My only issue with the report’s methodology is that it generates gunshot rates by comparing the number of gunshots to the geographic area in which the technology is deployed, whereas gun injury rates developed both by the FBI and the CDC compare injury numbers to an area’s population. At this point that we can’t really tell whether the measurement of gun violence by ShotSpotter can really be compared to the usual way that we measure gun violence, namely, by the number of bodies that end up in ER, Trauma, or the morgue. On the other hand, we have to assume that outside of shooting ranges or hunting areas, anywhere that a gun goes off, gun injuries won’t be far behind.

I happen to think that ShotSpotter technology is an effective response to gun violence for the simple reason that the data collected by a ShotSpotter device, if nothing else, tells us where guns are can be found. And despite what Gun Nation would like to believe, it’s the gun, not the person, which causes 31,000+ gun deaths every year. How we find and (yes) grab those guns remains to be figured out.  But ShotSpotter is a good first step.