Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 92

Think That Suicide Isn’t Gun Violence? Think Again.

The bad news is that suicides overall are up, the good news is that gun suicides as a percentage of all suicides is down. Well, kinda down.  Fifteen years ago, the CDC counted 29,199 suicides of all types across America; the per-100K rate was 10.48.  In 2014, the overall number was 42,773; the rate had climbed 23 percent to 12.93.  Ouch!  That’s not good.  Gun suicides, on the other hand, claimed 16,599 lives in 1999 for a 100-K rate of 5.96; in 2014 gun suicides were 21,334 resulting in a 100-K rate of 6.34.  So the gun suicide rate only increased by 6 percent.  I guess Gun Nation is doing something right, right?

Actually, wrong. Want the latest and greatest from Gun Nation about suicide and guns?  Take a look at the new, online safety program developed by the NSSF.  It’s a glossy website that gives a roadmap for ‘responsible’ gun ownership based on safe storage, training, communication and all the other things that you should do to be a ‘responsible gun owner.’  The website includes a nice list of safe storage options ‘to fit your lifestyle and home circumstances,’ ranging from a trigger lock to a full-size gun safe, all of which should be used to ‘prevent accidents.’

But what if you don’t want to lock the gun away because you might need to use it to shoot a You-Know-Who breaking down the front door?  After all, isn’t concealed or open carry also a lifestyle?  You betcha, considering that for the last twenty years the gun industry and its media sycophants have been promoting how much safer you’ll be if you own a gun.

But will you be safer?  To my utter astonishment, the NSSF’s safety brochure actually contains a statement about gun risk which is true: “Keeping a firearm to defend your family makes no sense if that same firearm puts family members or visitors to your home at risk.”  What kind of risk? The risk that is never mentioned by the NSSF or anyone else who promotes gun ownership, namely, risk that someone might end their own life with a gun. The NSSF gets about as close to this untouchable issue as they can by noting that gun safety is particularly necessary if “loved ones experience a difficult time.”  Well, at least Gun Nation has found a pleasant euphemism for depression; i.e., a ‘difficult time.’

But let’s drop the euphemism and look at reality: “States with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm suicide and overall suicide.  This relationship held for both genders and all age groups.  It remained true after accounting for poverty, urbanization and unemployment.” The link between gun ownership and suicide is particularly evident among teens, according to researchers at Harvard’s School of Public Health, and the fastest-growing age-group prone to suicides are teens. Since 2007, the overall rate of gun suicide has increased by 12%, the gun suicide rate among teens is up by 42%.

Why is Gun Nation so reluctant to mention the word suicide when they talk about gun safety?  Because it’s an unbroken rule among the gun-nut fraternity/sorority that the only people whose lives are lost from the misuse of guns are law-abiding citizens who didn’t use a gun to defend themselves against the You-Know-Who’s.  Think I’m overstating things?  Just listen to Wayne-o or home-school queen Dana Loesch repeat this nonsense in the videos they produce for the NRA.

Don’t think that suicide isn’t gun violence?  Think again.  Here’s how violence is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary: “Behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.” Notice it doesn’t say ‘someone else,’ because that’s a crime called aggravated assault.

Violence means damage and there’s nothing out there that can damage someone as effectively or quickly as a gun, particularly when you don’t even have to aim.  As far as I’m concerned, at least when it comes to suicide, maybe the GVP community should just drop the ‘V.’

 

 

Even If Hillary Uses The Gun Issue Against Bernie, Will It Work Against Cruz Or Trump?

Ever since Hillary broke Bill’s taboo on making guns a campaign issue, I began to fantasize about the possibility that, for the first time of all time, guns might become a major issue in a Presidential election.  In other words, what might be in the offing for November would be a national plebiscite about guns.

But then a strange thing happened, because all of a sudden Hillary wasn’t waiting for the general election to push her gun agenda against red blowhards like Cruz or Trump; in fact, she was using the gun issue to shore up her path to the Democratic nomination itself.  And the reason she was doing this was that every time there was a mass shooting, she could remind Democratic voters that her opponent from Vermont voted for the 2005 law that gave gun makers immunity from wrongful-death suits.  In fairness to Bernie, it should be pointed out that he also voted against the invasion of Iraq whereas Hillary followed the herd and voted the other way.  Okay, so even if maybe she tried to steal the White House silverware, she’s not exactly Caesar’s wife.

            Today there is a great article in The Trace that examines in detail how the Clinton campaign is using the gun issue to round up more delegate votes. Turns out that she’s hired a consulting firm that specializes in identifying different demographic groups that might respond to a particular campaign message crafted either from the Left or the Right. And it further turns out that, based on their model of where gun owners tend to live, that Hillary’s strong gun-control stance will apparently resonate in areas of upcoming primary states which will deliver a majority of the delegates that she needs in order to wrap things up before the big deal in Philadelphia on July 25th.

Of course, as Dan Friedman points out, the same Hillary Clinton who is taking such a courageous stance on gun control in 2016 was the self-same Hillary Clinton who exhibited a much more compassionate and reassuring stance towards gun owners after the Bomber uttered his infamous ‘clinging’ comment about guns and religion back in 2008.  To counteract Barack’s strength among urban voters leading up to the Pennsylvania primary, Hillary tried to shore up the rural vote by backing off a previous stand that favored a national handgun registry; she also helped push the ‘more human’ Hillary image with stories about hunting with Dad.

If Hillary’s campaign managers had wanted to save themselves lots of money this time around, they didn’t have to hire a fancy-schmancy consulting firm to tell them where Democratic voters live who would be receptive to her new-found concern about guns.  All they needed to do was look at a map that broke down the 2012 election returns on a county-by-county basis and the counties that are colored the darkest blue are where most of the gun-control populations tend to live.

And where are these counties located?  In the larger, urban areas with large minority communities where Hillary tends to do well.  And since urban counties usually have much larger populations than the less-populated rural areas where support for Hillary often fades, a strong message about gun violence could net her more delegates than Bernie even if the popular vote remains fairly split.  New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, California, New Jersey – five states with large, urban populations coming up.  These states alone award over 1,200 delegates and if Clinton can grab the bulk of the highly-populated county delegates by pushing a gun-control agenda, who would argue with that?

But the real issue is looking past July to see whether the gun issue can be sustained in a general election against one of the hare-brained red jerks.  Because when it comes to guns, Hillary might have the cities, but gun control certainly isn’t a winner in rural areas and may not be an advantage in the suburbs.  And guess what?  A majority of Americans live in the burbs.

Should Doctors Treat Gun Violence? A Program At The Children’s Hospital Of Philadelphia Shows You How.

I don’t know how Philadelphia came to be known as the City of Brotherly Love, but I can tell you that the name doesn’t apply to certain sections of the city.  I’m thinking, for example, of the neighborhood known as North Philadelphia/West, which is actually walking distance from the Museum of Art steps that Rocky Balboa climbed back in 1976.  And I’m wondering whether a modern-day Rocky could run down 24th Street today without getting mugged, or robbed, or worse. Because the crime numbers, particularly robberies, assaults and homicides, just don’t seem to be possible except they really are.

For the last 30 days, this neighborhood of slightly less than 60,000 residents reported 60 violent crimes (homicide, rape, robbery, assault), along with 188 serious property crimes (auto, burglary, theft.)  If this crime rate continues, and it will probably go up as the weather gets warmer, North Philly-West will be running an annual violent crime rate of 100 per 100,000, with a homicide rate alone of 20 – the national homicide rate is under 4.

And by the way, don’t think for one minute that North Philly-West is all that bad.  In fact, when it comes to violent crime rates, there are 13 Philadelphia neighborhoods that are worse. Fairhill, which is just a hop, skip and jump away from North Philly, may end the year with a homicide rate of 160!  That’s simply not possible.  But you know what?  There were two murders over the last 30 days in this neighborhood of 16,000 people, four homicides already this year. As Bill Clinton said in his 2012 speech re-nominating Barack Obama: “Do the arithmetic.”

So Philadelphia has a murder problem, which means it has a shooting problem, which means it has a problem with kids.  Because I don’t care whether we are talking about North Philly, Chicago Heights, East St. Louis or Timbuctoo, when it comes to violence, this problem first shows up in kids, particularly early-teen boys.  By the ages of 12-13 they have guns, by the ages of 15-16, they are using them in the streets, by the ages of 20-21 they are on their way to either going to jail for homicide or going to the morgue.

Which means that effective interventions have to involve behavior modification and getting rid of the guns.  Now let me stop right here and say that I’m not interested in any discussion about 2nd Amendment crap, okay?  Enough is enough with all this nonsense about how any attempt to regulate guns deprives law-abiding Americans of their God-given rights to defend themselves or whatever else God allegedly gives them the right to do. We figured out how to prevent the spread of Ebola, it shouldn’t take rocket science to figure out how to stop the spread of violence committed with guns.

And one place it is being figured out is at CHOP, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, a remarkable medical facility that has been pioneering pediatric medicine since its founding in 1855.  In the aftermath of Sandy Hook, the hospital developed a program specifically aimed at curbing gun violence among pre-adults in an effort to reduce what had become nearly 1,000 juvenile shooting victims every year.  The program, called Violence Prevention Initiative (VIP), has screened more than 108,000 juveniles who come into the ER with symptoms and histories that might make them at risk for violence.  A small number of these kids are then closely monitored and kids also receive anti-violence lessons in school.

And here’s something to bear in mind.  Asking teenagers about reasons why they are violent often involves discussions about very personal things.  And many young people are reluctant or resistant to have such discussions with cops, or teachers, or even their friends. But the one place that everyone feels secure enough to say anything they want is behind a closed door sitting across from that kindly man or woman who wears a white coat. Which is why doctors always need to be involved in dealing with the violence caused by guns.

Are Guns Pathogens? Yes. They Cause A Disease Called Gun Violence.

            You may recall that last year eight national medical organizations plus the American Bar Association issued a manifesto calling for medical professionals to become more involved in the debate about gun violence. Actually there wouldn’t be any reason for physicians to justify or explain their professional responsibility to counsel patients on gun violence if it weren’t for red-meat politicians at the state and federal level who gin up political support from Tea Party elements by pretending that guns aren’t a risk to health.

            Of course we all know that guns don’t kill people, right? Know how many gun homicides and suicides were recorded by the CDC in 2014?  32,743.  Know how many homicide-suicide deaths occurred with every other type of device?  26,354. Nah, guns aren’t lethal, people are lethal. And if you really agree with Wayne-o and all the other gun promoters on that one, please don’t waste your time sending me a snarky tweet or a nasty blog.  Go lay brick.

            When the Florida gun-crazies passed the physician gag law I was actually somewhat pleased in a perverse kind of way.  Because the truth is that prior to Docs v. Glocks, medicine had allowed itself to get sidelined on the gun issue through a combination of inadvertence, lack of specific counseling guidelines and the refusal of the federal government to fund gun-violence research through the CDC.  And even though medical academies like the AAP had issued pronouncements about gun violence over the years, stating a concern about a medical problem is one thing, doing something about it is something else.

            But last year’s manifesto by the 8 medical organizations marked a turning of the tide, and a recent editorial in the Boston Globe demonstrates that the medical community is moving back into the center of the gun debate where it happens to belong.  The editorial, “Doctors should talk to patients about guns,” is a no-holds barred declaration by the newspaper’s editors that doctors need to go beyond voluntary screening for gun risk and incorporate such questions into their everyday contact with patients.  The editorial recommends the development of clinical guidelines that would not only give guidance for what kinds of questions should be asked, but would “lay the groundwork for breakthrough research on the effect of gun ownership and the roots of gun violence.” In this regard, doctors in Massachusetts have a willing and forceful ally in State Attorney General Maura Healey, who has offered the resources of her office to help develop and implement treatment guidelines as well.

            The Globe editorial was acknowledged several days later in a Letter to the Editor from two prominent Massachusetts pediatricians, Judith and Sean Palfrey, the a past-President of the AAP, the latter a leader in the campaign to rid lead from environments in which children live and play. What makes this letter so important is the following statement: “Guns, and the bullets they shoot, are deadly pathogens….” 

            Like it or not, that statement happens to be the truth.  The evidence to bolster that statement has been published again, and again, and again.  And I believe that as physicians get more involved in counseling their patients about guns, their approach should be governed by this one fact above all: guns are pathogens.  And a pathogen is something which causes a disease.  And 120,000 violent deaths and injuries each year is a disease.  Period.  Let’s cut the nonsense, okay?

            By the way, calling a gun a pathogen has nothing to do with 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’  I happen to be carrying around 30 pounds of excess weight.  And when I see my beloved internist he would be remiss if he didn’t tell me to cut out some of those carbs that I love to eat.  But it’s my choice if I want to keep eating more than I should.  And it’s his responsibility to remind me of how what I choose to eat might affect my health.  Think it’s different with guns?  Think again.

What? The Trace Actually Tries To Use Facts To Figure Out If More Women Own Guns?

I want to congratulate Alex Yablon and The Trace for getting to the virtual apex of gun journalism which can be defined as any commentary or article that receives a full-length response from the NSSF.  As you know, the NSSF represents the gun industry the same way the NRA represents gun owners; i.e., what’s good for guns is good for America, and in this particular instance, the NSSF felt it necessary to correct all kinds of errors and misstatements about the number of women who are buying guns.

The NSSF’s editorial opens with their half-baked crap about how The Trace is owned by Bloomberg, so of course nothing can be true.  Right away this tells us that we’re dealing not with journalism that has the slightest pretense towards objectivity, but just indulges in whatever smear campaign happens to fill the bill.  The commentary then goes on to score Yablon for relying on data from the General Social Survey (GSS) which has to be wrong because, after all, it is based on “methodological limitations” that seriously undercount gun ownership throughout the United States.

What are these ‘methodological limitations’ that render the GSS a useless source for understanding anything about guns?  It’s the same ‘limitation’ that pro-gun noisemakers like Gary Kleck and John Lott have been using for more than twenty years to discount serious gun research, namely, the canard that Americans won’t disclose ownership of guns to anyone who might then leak such information back to the Feds.  Of course neither of these phony intellectuals has ever actually asked anyone whether they are reluctant to disclose information to a government agency or to anyone else. But when you earn a living appealing to an audience that’s pre-disposed to be suspicious of government anyway, it’s not hard to convince such folks that a government or quasi-government survey isn’t worth salt.

The problem with this argument, of course, is that it flies in the face of reality. If anything, gun ownership in the current climate has become a badge of good citizenship, patriotism, and any other cultural symbol that, if embraced by everyone, would make America great again.  It’s pretty hard on the one hand to celebrate the spread of unquestioned CCW to almost every state while, on the other hand, continuing to claim that Americans are afraid to disclose legal ownership of guns.

But has the pro-gun noise machine ever been concerned with aligning its arguments with facts?  And this is the ‘problem,’ if you will, with Alex Yablon’s attempt to figure out whether or not women really represent a new market for guns, because as a serious journalist writing for a serious journalistic enterprise, he is required to look at the facts.  Which means that since the FBI doesn’t publish data on the gender breakdown of NICS-background checks, everyone who wants to research whether there are more women into shooting has to rely, to a certain extent, on data that simply cannot be exact.

Want a quick lesson in how to take hot air and turn it into ‘facts?’  Take a look at the 2014 NSSF survey on women and shooting which the organization claims contains “well-explained” findings about all those gals who now own guns. In fact, its so-called findings are based primarily on interviews with women who attended the SHOT show, which happens to be an industry-only exhibition, which means that most of the women interviewed for this report were either gun shop owners, employees, or spouses-partners of men who work in the gun trade.  Now that’s a real objective survey, right?

This past Saturday I stopped in at four gun shops because I was in the mood to buy a gun.  Together these four shops had 10-11 customers other than me.  How many were women?  As many as the number of guns I ended buying – none.  But that’s because nobody had a German-made PPK in the counter or a 20-guage Ruger Red Label on the wall.  I’ll match my ‘scientific’ survey against the NSSF any time.

Georgia Either Becomes A Dumb State Because Campus Carry Becomes Legal Or It Stays Smart.

               One of my good friends is a retired high school assistant principal, and he once told me that the dumbest idea in the entire history of American education was the notion of middle school.  I would agree with him except for the fact that the stupidity of middle school, as far as I am concerned, has been eclipsed by the stupidity of campus carry, which is so dumb that it can only be regarded as the penultimate proof that the lunatics have taken over the asylum, at least in the eight states where carrying guns on college campuses is now law.

            The latest state which has passed such a measure is Georgia, which if the Governor signs the bill, would allow anyone 21 years or older to walk around Georgia Tech, University of Georgia or any other college campus in the peach state with a concealed gun. Last year the same effort failed because Governor Deal had the good sense to forego singing a similar measure and news reports indicate that he has expressed concerns about the new bill as well.  And the fact that Deal is a Republican doesn’t mean he’s going to roll over and play dead in front of the NRA and their conservative allies because the Governor just vetoed a ‘religious freedom’ measure that was supported by the same gaggle of jerks and dopes that want all Georgia college students to be able to walk around armed.

            Why do I say that campus CCW is the dumbest educational idea since the invention of middle school?  First of all, despite hysterical propaganda from a bunch of libertarian students known as Students for Concealed Carry (libertarians tend to be hysterical about everything) there is simply no truth to the idea that college campuses are places with high or even modest levels of crime.  And despite the fact that colleges tend to underreport minor offenses, other than vandalism which often accompanies too much drinking, a lot more students have defaulted on their loans than commit any kind of serious or violent crime.  In fact, even when it comes to sexual assaults, it turns out that the rate of these crimes is higher among women who are not enrolled in college as opposed to women who are students at the time the rape occurs.

            I would be opposed to CCW on campuses no matter what the crime rate for the simple fact that qualifying for Georgia concealed-carry does not require any training at all.  Go to a probate court, pay a fee, pass a NICS-background check and you’re good to go. The idea that college students who, like all younger people, tend to be impulsive, should be walking around with a lethal weapon without first demonstrating judgement and competence at least equal to or exceeded by what is required from every cop is simply too dumb to be accepted or even considered as a legal norm.

            And it’s not just the students who might lack experience and common sense.  Our friends at Everytown who have been fighting campus-carry laws with their usual combination of grass-roots organizing, advertisements, petitions and social media plugs, sent out a press release today which carried the story of an accidental shooting at a college campus at Idaho State University. Except the shooter in this case was a member of the faculty whose gun went off while he was lecturing in class, which resulted in this dope shooting himself in the foot.

            Now I always thought that the role of college faculty, in addition to being experts in a particularly discipline or field, was to behave as role models for students simply because they have had experiences in the world that college kids are just beginning to comprehend. So what’s this idiot who shot himself going to do the next time the class meets?  Show up in a wheelchair displaying his bandaged foot? No doubt he’ll still be carrying his gun.  After all, it’s his 2nd-Amendment right, right?   

How Can We Stop Guns From Getting Into The Wrong Hands? Simple: Just Stop The Guns.

There’s an elephant sitting largely undisturbed in the GVP living room, and it consists of the 75,000 times each year when someone picks up a gun and uses it to hurt someone else.  In medicine this is referred to as ‘intentional injury/firearm.’  The cops call it an aggravated assault but if the bullet hits a vital spot, then a homicide has occurred.  Either way, these events account for more than two-thirds of all gun injuries, and the number appears to be going up.  For sure it’s going up in places like Chicago and Detroit, where rates have always exceeded national averages for violence caused with guns.

With all due respect to the energy and commitment if GVP activists, I still don’t believe this problem is being addressed at its core.  It’s all well and good to ask the government to expand background checks on private gun sales, or crack down on straw sales, or pass stronger laws against gun trafficking, and I’m not arguing against the utility of such plans; I’m simply saying that none of those strategies attack the root of the problem, and the root is not supply but demand.  Because what all those programs have in common is the belief that if the supply of guns that might end up in the wrong hands is choked off at the point where those guns enter or re-enter the market, this will lead to a smaller number of illegal guns, which will lead to fewer guns getting into the wrong hands, which will lead to less guns being used to inflict injuries on others.

Unfortunately, while we know a lot about the supply side of the argument, we know next to nothing about the demand for guns.  Why do a small percentage of individuals who commit violent acts against others commit these acts by using guns? According to the CDC, there were 2.3 million intentional, violence-related injuries in 2013, of which 78,000, or 3%, were caused by guns. So while we focus our thoughts and concerns on the 3%, the fact is that 97% of people who commit violent acts choose not to use a gun.  And I simply don’t believe that the motives which explain that choice can be assumed to reflect difficulties in getting hold of a gun.  Particularly because in neighborhoods where most gun violence occurs, even the younger kids will tell you that a gun can easily be acquired in 24 hours or less.

The problem with choking off guns at the point of supply is that most such policies would require some change in behavior of law-abiding sellers or buyers of guns.  The movie, Making A Killing, includes a segment about Chuck’s Gun Shop, out of whose inventory comes many guns that end up being used in Chicago crimes.  Know what happened after Chuck’s promised to be more vigilant in checking who was buying their guns?  Gun violence in Chicago went up.  I know, I know.  There are plenty of other gun shops located close enough to the Windy City where the bad guys can get guns.  That’s exactly my point.  As long as guns are legal commerce, don’t ask me how, don’t ask me why, the market will find some way to satisfy demand.

Back in the 16th Century, the French monarchy imposed a very strict tariff on salt, the gabelle, in order to raise funds for the always-depleted royal treasury. Know what happened?  Salt smuggling became the #1 non-farming occupation in Southern France. It’s a mistake which we make all the time to differentiate between the ‘legal’ market and the ‘illegal’ or ‘black’ market, because in fact they operate exactly the same way.  A market, legal or illegal, is created whenever there is an exchange of products for money and regulating the former may have little or no impact on the latter.

Of course there’s one infallible way to regulate both markets when it comes to guns.  And we all know what that way is.

Making A Killing: Don’t Miss This Movie

There’s a media company in California called Brave New Films which earlier this year released a remarkable documentary about America and guns.  The film is called Making A Killing – Guns, Greed and the NRA, and from the title you can easily guess which side of the gun argument is being caught in this film.  It’s a lengthy production for a documentary, runs more than 90 minutes, and much of the footage is devoted to comments by the families and friends of people whose lives were ended because they got in the way of a loaded gun.

The film is divided into four basic segments, each covering a category of gun death with which we are all too familiar: domestic abuse where an ex-husband assaults the ex-wife, the accidental shooting of a young kid, the endless shootings which take place virtually every day in Chicago, and a suicide committed by a seemingly stable young man who runs out one day, gets a gun and does himself in.

Interspersed between each segment are some quick cameos of the usual gun-nonsense comments by Wayne-o, as well as various devotees of the 2nd Amendment including Rubio and Cruz.  I must say that juxtaposing a shooting victim lying in the street with Ted Cruz saying that expanded background checks won’t do “anything at all” makes the gap between gun violence reality and pro-gun political pandering a joy to behold.  Not that the film is joyful in any sense of that word, but I really am pleased at how the filmmakers created an aesthetic production without sacrificing any truth or honesty at all.

Of course there are people who will say that there’s no necessary connection between the fact that Glock pistols are used in countless acts of gun violence and that Gaston Glock lives in a beautiful mansion or that Wayne-o evidently keeps his front lawn neat and trim. And while the production weaves back and forth between data on the number of people killed and wounded by guns each year versus the revenue and profits that accrue to companies like S&W and Colt, ultimately the question has to be asked whether there are certain types of profit-making ventures where the physical costs ultimately outweigh the financial gains.  What the film does project in a particularly direct and emotional way is the efforts of the gun industry to separate itself from the physical toll connected to the products that it manufactures and sells.

This brings me to the last twenty minutes or so of the film and I am not sure if I can adequately convey the degree to which this final footage is simply beyond anything that exists when it comes to capturing the extreme violence associated with guns.  Because this last segment relives in the most graphic terms, the mass shooting in the movie theater at Aurora, and what makes it so chillingly and terribly effective is that in parts it is narrated by the shooter himself!

That’s right.  The filmmakers use some of the taped interviews with James Holmes to show how he methodically collected what he refers to as his ‘equipment,’ i.e., guns, ammo, smoke bombs and gear.  Then his voice narrates how he drove to the theater and parked out back.  Meanwhile, you are then taken inside the theater where moviegoers describe how they lined up for popcorn, went to their seats, settled back to watch the show.  And then here comes Holmes again who says, in a clinically measured voice, that planning the shooting was how he coped with his depression because going into stores and onto the internet to buy ammo and guns allowed him to “shift from the suicidal to the homicidal.” And then we hear a smoke bomb go off, and a theater security camera captures panicked, terrified people fleeing from the scene.

I can’t say any more.  See the film and judge for yourself.  The moviemakers set an initial goal of 1,000 screenings and 100,000 pairs of eyes in front of those screens and they are almost there.  Help them exceed that goal?  Contact Brave New Films.

Want To Make A Million In The Gun Business? Start With Two Million.

If you think I’m kidding about losing your rear end in the gun business, I can tell you that if I had been holding one million shares of S&W stock three weeks ago I would have been worth roughly $30 million bucks and the same pile of shares today would fetch about $8 million less.  Meanwhile, the financial media is abuzz with the idea that the great run-up of gun sales thanks to you-know-who in the White House has finally come to an end. On the other hand, according to FBI-NICS, the number of background checks is at an all-time high. So what’s really going on?

First of all, we need to remember that most of the guns manufactured in the United States come from companies that are still in private hands.  The only publicly-owned companies that provide detailed numbers are Smith & Wesson and Ruger, which together account for roughly 20% of all guns made each year in the US, but because of imports to the US market, their overall share of the gun business is somewhat less.

As for FBI-NICS background checks, these numbers are also not quite what they seem.  The gun industry would like you to believe that NICS checks are continuing to zoom upward, but the report issued by the FBI each month counts every time the telephone rings at the NICS call center in West Virginia, whether it’s for a gun transfer or not.  And in fact, roughly half the background checks each month are for reasons that have nothing to do with gun transfers at all, namely, to check the validity of gun licenses, pawn redemptions, etc.

The reason why several stock analysts downgraded S&W stock was because handgun transfers dropped 13% from February to March, with the decline in long gun transfers also noticeable but not quite as severe. And while the sell-through numbers posted in Ruger’s latest 10K report indicates that products aren’t piling up on anyone’s shelves, the bottom line is that gun sales simply haven’t been all that strong since the post-Sandy Hook gun-control furor died down.

Before I get into the NICS numbers in more detail, first, NICS doesn’t distinguish between new and used guns, which means, to begin with, that using NICS to judge the health of gun-making companies isn’t such a bright idea. Second, since NICS covers transfers, not the number of guns transferred, the monthly numbers for handguns and long guns are certainly undercounted, but nobody knows by how much.  On the other hand, NICS data is a good measure of gun transfer trends, which obviously reflects the health of the industry as a whole.

With that in mind, let’s look at monthly NICS transfers for March and start back in 2005.  Total gun transfers that March were 580,000, which climbed to 675,000 in March, 2008.  The number went to 900,000 in Obama’s first March (2009) and remained right around that figure each March through 2012.  Then we had Sandy Hook and a noisy argument about expanding background checks – the 2013 number was 1.4 million, but in 2014 it slipped down 17% to 1.1 million and remained at that same level the following year.

Here’s the bottom line.  Despite all the hue and cry from Gun Nation about how ‘everyone’ is getting into guns, the NICS numbers have been basically unchanged since the Democrats stopped trying to regulate guns.  And nobody is going to tell me that the 40% increase in NICS directly after Sandy Hook reflected a sudden upswell of interest by new buyers who wanted to purchase guns. So the gun market will continue to drift downward until the Clintons reclaim their love nest at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Unless the unthinkable happens in November and we elect someone who just ‘loves’ the 2nd Amendment.  In which case you can start off with however much money you want and you’ll still wind up with bupkis when all is said and done.

The Doctors For Responsible Gun Ownership Crawl Out From Under Their Rock Again.

               It figures that just when an effort is being made to push money for gun research back into the budget of the CDC, that the Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership would crawl out from underneath their rock and once again simply lie to the American public about the medical risks of guns. These guys have been around for the last twenty years and even though they claim to represent a large group of physicians, I have never found a single doctor who would admit to being involved with these charlatans because what they say about guns and medicine is simply an attempt to promote gun ownership without the slightest shred of evidence that supports anything they claim to be true.

               Their latest attempt to use the fact that they claim to be real physicians in order to pretend that what they say is scientifically-based is a little meme on their Facebook page which purports to give the true ‘data’ about gun violence, in particular the number of lives lost each year because of guns. Their post begins with the statement that 32,000 ‘firearm-related’ deaths a year are, in fact, a number in decline.  Actually, the 2014 number is 33,599, which is up from the 2011 total of 32,351.  In fact, the number has been rising steadily since 2000 when it hit a low-point of 28,663.  Where do I get my numbers which show a 17% increase since Y2K?  The same place those schmucks claim to have gotten their numbers: the CDC. Moving right along.

               They then claim that 80% of all gun homicides are the result of crimes and participation in gang activity.  Now to begin with, they give the number as 10,560 when in fact the real number of gun-related homicides is 10,945.  You might think this is a trifle to be upset about, but remember we are talking about doctors who are supposed to use evidence-based data to support their point of view.  So either the number is correct or its wrong.

               More important, their statement about 80% of gun homicides being the work of criminals or gang members is simply not true.  According to the FBI, less than 20% of all gun homicides take place during the commission of violent crimes.  And somewhere around another 5% of all gun homicides are listed as involving criminal activities between gangs.  Most gun homicides are crimes after the fact because they take place as a result of a domestic or other dispute and until someone decides to end the argument by pulling out a gun, no crime has usually occurred.  Moving right along.

               Having decided that only 5% of all gun homicides take place outside of criminal events, these medical frauds then concoct the usual statistic designed to show that there’s really no gun violence in America by simply taking the number of murders left over after eliminating just about everyone killed with a gun, dividing that number by the total American population and declaring that “America does not have a gun problem.” 

               I’ll tell you what America has right now.  It has two or three men claiming to be physicians who simply invent whatever numbers they want to invent in order to serve as shameless shills for the NRA.  That’s all these guys are: shills and stupid ones at that.  You would think that if they wanted to convince any physician that their numbers mean anything at ball, that at least they would copy the numbers correctly from the CDC.

               But the truth is that these phonies aren’t looking to convince other physicians of the rightness of their cause. They are simply trying to make sure that any time the issue of gun violence and medicine comes up, they’ll get a call to appear on Fox News, the NRA video channel or some other media channel that will help them spread their exaggerations, untruths and outright lies.  God bless America, even quacks like this bunch can find a warm rock under which to build a nest.