Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 93

Should We Assume That Being A Patriot Means You Like Guns? I’m Not So Sure.

One of my favorite books was Fritz Stern’s The Politics of Cultural Despair. The author, whose family left Nazi Germany in 1938, tried to explain how a cultured and modern society like Germany could descend to the depravity of the Nazis and then destroy itself by launching a world-wide Holocaust which, among other things, resulted in the extermination of six million Jews. The book was a study of three German political theorists whose writings provided the historical and ideological bedrock for the Nazi regime, in particular its rejection of modern liberalism and all its variants (Socialism, Communism), as well as its virulent anti-Semitism.  Basically Stern argued that many Germans felt threatened by the modernism of Weimar and wanted a return to a simpler, more conservative and more traditional life: small villages instead of large urban concentrations, petty craft instead of factory assembly-lines, social and spiritual values supporting hierarchy, discipline and customary family life.

Sound familiar?  It should if only because most of these concepts have become watchwords of the political conundrums that appear to be enveloping the Republican party as it stumbles through the primaries leading up to the Cleveland convention which threatens to implode even before it begins.  But the rejection of modernism in the form of progressivism has also been the watchword of the NRA in its long battle to fight off any and all threats perceived to weaken the 2nd Amendment, thus preventing consumers from getting their hands on guns.

The funny thing about the 2nd Amendment is that the whole idea of maintaining this sacred text unchanged and unchallenged fits perfectly into what is considered to be the typical mental and cultural view of people who own and like guns. There’s a reason why only Republican politicians show up at the annual NRA meeting; there’s a reason why the NRA posts daily messages reminding its members that Hillary is such a threat; there’s a reason why the NRA calls itself “America’s oldest civil rights organization;” there’s a reason why every Wayne-o video ends with the slogan: “Freedom’s Safest Place.”

There’s only one little problem, however, with all these messages that pretend to equate gun ownership with the traditional, conservative values that Fritz Stern showed coming into collision with the modern German society and state, namely, none of this tells us why some people own guns but more people don’t.  The demographics of gun ownership are usually presented as resting on older white men who live in smaller cities and towns that are usually located in the South, Midwest or Mountain states, work in blue-collar occupations, live in traditional marriage/family arrangements and vote Republican every chance they get.

Unfortunately, while this may explain why the NRA annual meeting comes complete this year with a country music jam featuring Brett Eldredge and Jana Kramer (I have absolutely no idea whom either of them are) what it doesn’t explain is the fact that many, in fact perhaps a majority of people who fit the gun-owning demographic don’t own guns at all.  And this is a big problem because the GVP community is comprised overwhelmingly of groups and individuals who would certainly consider themselves as being in the progressive or liberal camp.  But how can they be sure that someone who claims to be a conservative is necessarily going to disagree with them when it comes to the issue of guns?

The GVP community needs to be careful in assuming that cultural attitudes about one particular thing necessarily flow over into attitudes about anything else.  A big hue and cry erupted in 1967 when Dean Rusk’s daughter married a black air force lieutenant. Would anyone other than a schmuck like Cliven Bundy care about an interracial marriage today?  I’m not saying that the NRA membership is ready to be converted to the GVP cause. But the fact that someone considers himself/herself to be a keeper of traditional values doesn’t mean they care one bit about guns. The GVP folks should figure out how to talk to them.

 

 

Comment On The Always Saddening Anniversary Of The Death Of Dr. King.

Is there the slightest possibility that two political scientists at the University of Illinois just happen to have discovered a possible link between racist attitudes and pro-gun sentiments at the same time that the most successful Republican presidential campaign rests on racial slurs directed at immigrants and a fervent love of the 2nd Amendment?  There has been a vaguely disguised racist appeal to much of the pro-gun rhetoric that links the value of gun ownership to personal protection against crime, some of it not so vague, but now that the Trumpster has made racism a genuinely acceptable rhetorical form during his campaign stops, it figures that some folks on the ‘other side’ of the gun debate would step up the rhetoric as well.  The result is a study which purports to prove that “racial prejudice colors all aspects of the debate regarding gun policy,” and that whites are susceptible to “the emotional and persuasive power of gun rights messaging which invokes the white, gun-carrying every-person who defends home and Democracy against (nonwhite) bad guys.”

The authors of this study define racist attitudes as the “politics of resentment,” which basically means a reaction by whites to what they perceived as the government conferring special privileges on blacks.  In particular, these so-called racially-based privileges included integrating schools and public facilities, preferential treatment in hiring, expanded welfare, in other words, the panoply of government programs which accompanied the elimination of legal Jim Crow in the decades following World War II. In that respect, the notion of gun ‘rights’ as an expression of hostility to government programs followed from taxpayer ‘rights’ that opposed welfare, homeowner ‘rights’ that opposed equal housing, and victims ‘rights’ that came down against more liberal treatment of criminal offenders; i.e., criminals who just happened to be blacks.

At this point the narrative of the article begins to wobble a bit, primarily because the authors veer off into a discussion of how the NRA changed from supporting gun-control laws in the 60s to taking a much more aggressive anti-government tone after the 1977 Harlon Carter putsch.  And the idea that the NRA was a believer in gun control until the Republicans began to develop a Southern base has remained part-and-parcel of virtually every discussion about guns, politics and race. And of course we all know, or at least we think we know that since liberals tend not to like guns, by definition the growth of an active, pro-gun movement led by the NRA and a shift towards the right by the GOP have gone hand-in-hand.

If you take a look at the votes that were cast in Congress for GCA68, the first significant gun-control legislation, the ‘nay’ votes in both the House and the Senate were cast overwhelmingly by the same members of Congress who voted against the civil rights bill in 1964 and the voting rights bill in 1965.  That the NRA was not yet poised to take advantage of the South’s resistance to federal “encroachments” did not in any way alter the fact that the South as a region had always been a gun-rich zone.  What drove pro-gun sentiment in the South was not racism per se, but the extent to which gun-control laws were seen as being forced on the South by the same liberal government that was using law to wipe away the vestiges of Jim Crow.

Gun ownership as an affirmation of racialist attitudes is certainly at play with the same extreme, political ideas that pop out of the mouths of Cliven Bundy and other militia fools and jerks. But I think it’s a little too simplistic and, in fact, somewhat quaint to assume that the emotions driving the gun debate from the pro-gun side largely stem from thoughts and angers about race. The real question we need to ask on this, the 48th anniversary of the shooting death of Dr. King, is what role does violence play in our everyday emotions and affairs?  After all, no violence, no need for guns.

 

 

Doesn’t Matter Whether It’s An A-Bomb Or A Glock – Get Your Hands On It And It’s Going To Go Off.

Sunday morning I watched the Trumpster being interviewed by Chris Wallace, and if it were not for the fact that he was talking about nuclear weapons, I found his comments so stupid that they were actually entertaining and fun. And what they brought back to me was a memory from the fourth or fifth grade when every month or so we would be told to get out of our seats and huddle under our desks to protect ourselves from an A-Bomb blast, which was over when the teacher yelled ‘all clear.’

              While my mind was reliving those ridiculous drills, a public notice flickered on the television screen that the high school in Yonkers was going to conduct an ‘active shooter’ drill, an exercise that the Yonkers PD has done several previous times beginning in 2014.  What is referred to in the industry as ‘Active Shooter and Intruder Response Training’ has become a big business since the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, and just to make sure that such training is as relevant as possible, a training outfit called Strategos International offers training specifically designed for schools, hospitals and faith-based organizations too.

Of course if it were up to the NRA, all you need to do to protect any workplace, school or other facility that might be a target is to make sure that every adult on the premises is walking around armed.  This was basically the organization’s initial response to Sandy Hook, but when the public response to Wayne-o’s loony “good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns” speech was not overwhelmingly positive, the NRA then issued a report called ‘National School Shield,’ which recommended 40-60 hours of firearm training for school employees who could then carry around guns.

How often does a gun go off at an educational institution?  Nobody has a comprehensive answer, but the research group at Everytown calculates that it has happened more than once a week since the beginning of 2013, of which roughly half of these 174 shootings took place in K-12 schools. And I’m not about to get into the stupid argument over whether a ‘school shooting’ is really a ‘school shooting’ if it takes place in the school playground rather than in a school building itself.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, roughly 90% of all K-12 schools control physical building access, which is always the best way to monitor threats to safety, and 28% of all schools are patrolled by security personnel carrying guns, in the case of high schools, professional security personnel are present 63% of the time.  The percentage of police in schools has been fairly constant since 2005, which certainly predates all the hue and cry about school security post-Sandy Hook.

The biggest problem in dealing with school shootings is not how to secure the building, but identifying who among the current or former student body might be capable of carrying out such a violent act.  Because a school shooting, like all school violence, is usually precipitated by someone who is either a student at the time of the incident, or was a student at that school and returns with a gun intending to right some past wrong.

Crouching under a wooden desk is about as much of a positive response to nuclear attack as giving someone a week-long course in armed force and then have them walking through a school hallway looking for a kid with a gun.  The whole point of nuclear non-proliferation is the recognition that once the weapon is out there, the chances of it being used go way up. Trump seems to be unaware that this is why a basic consensus exists that the world needs to be a nuclear-free zone.

The same argument can be made about gun-free zones which, despite the nonsense peddled by the NRA, make every place safer if guns aren’t allowed.  And it’s no violation of anyone’s 2nd Amendment rights to leave the gun at home.

 

 

The Way Things Are Going Isn’t Good News For People Who Love Their Guns.

The other day a student studying public health came to my gun shop and spent an hour talking to me about guns. After going through the current numbers, which depressingly appear to be going up, she asked me if I could predict the eventual role of guns in American life. And I told her that predictions seem to be based more on what you want to see happen than what you know will happen, and this is certainly the case with guns.  On the other hand, the annual demographic projections made by Pew have just been released, and if the way that different demographic groups behave with guns continues to be the way they will behave with guns, the issue of gun violence in the long run may take care of itself.

Because the truth is, and I won’t back down on this no matter how many Gun Nation trolls send me the crazy emails that I will receive, if you aren’t walking around with a shield on your chest, you simply don’t need a gun.  You might like guns; you might (like me) want to own lots of guns; you might not understand why everyone doesn’t want to have a gun, but you don’t need a gun.  Even Ted Nugent eats mostly store-bought food and the number of people who honestly have used a gun to defend themselves from criminals, contrary to John Lott’s bullsh*t, is absurdly small.  So owning a gun just isn’t like owning a car or even a droid.  And if you want to believe that a gun makes you “free,” then you go right ahead because something called the Constitution, not your AR-15, allows you to believe anything you want.

That being said, the bottom line of the Pew demographic report is that this country is steadily and inexorably moving towards a population profile that just doesn’t favor guns.  Right now we are still racially more than 60% White, but the flood of non-White immigration will not abate no matter what Trump says, and twenty years from now the non-White and the immigrant-based population will be climbing towards 50%. Colion Noir can prance around a shooting range all he wants, but the bottom line is that non-Whites, generally speaking, aren’t particularly attracted to guns.

Perhaps the bigger change, because it encompasses racial categories, is the degree to which women are steadily moving ahead into positions of economic power and cultural influence both within the public arena and at home.  The proportion of single-parent households continues to increase, the proportion of women who are the sole primary family financial provider is pushing towards 50%, and women continue to make gains in the workplace in terms of leadership on the job.  I don’t care how many times home-schooling queen Dana Loesch tells us that she loves her guns, most women don’t agree. And the fact that, according to the NSSF, there’s been a surge in women participating in the shooting sports is a function of changes in how families participate in social activities, not in the number of women who buy and own guns.

Let’s understand something: a prediction is not a fact.  So it could turn out, although I doubt it, that Pew’s projections of how the country is changing will ultimately be at variance with what the country’s population looks like down the road.  For that matter, who can say for sure that women, new immigrants and minorities will continue, in the main, to be anti-gun.  But there are two reasons why what I see in the current trends will end up being true.

First, Pew’s work isn’t just a one-shot deal.  They base their predictions on the continuation of trends they have been following and charting for more than thirty years.  Second, Gun Nation really hasn’t come up with a solid argument for gun ownership beyond what they have been saying for the last thirty years, and these groups have remained resistant to guns over that entire span of time. And unless Gun Nation can figure out a way to make their case to new immigrants, minorities and women, the country will contain less people who want to own guns.  And guess what?  Less guns means less gun violence.  It’s as simple as that.

 

Want To Build An Effective GVP Campaign? Don’t Talk About It – Sell It.

               A few years ago I was at a gun show in York, PA, a farm town about 60 miles west of Philadelphia.  Talk about a gun show ‘loophole,’ the entire show was a loophole because all the 200 or so tables were taken by guys who proudly displayed their junky, old guns along with other slightly rusted bric-a-brac.  But I can tell you there wasn’t a single person walking around the armory who had the slightest intention of doing anything illegal with a gun.

               About a week before the show, Pennsylvania had changed its CCW law, moving from being a discretionary, ‘may issue’ to a non-discretionary ‘shall issue’ state. The Sheriff in York was so inundated by applicants that he had to bring in additional help.  I happened to be standing next to a guy who had just come from the Sheriff and was being interviewed by a reporter from Philadelphia who heard about the long delays and came out to see what was up.  The interview went as follows:

               Reporter:  How long did you have to wait to get processed?

               Gun Guy:  Oh, three or four hours.  Was a mess.

               Reporter:  Why do you want a concealed-carry license?

               Gun Guy:  Well, I’m worried about all the crime around here.

               Reporter:  You know, I checked before coming out and York hasn’t had a serious crime in the last two years.

               Gun Guy:  Yea, but they’ll come out from Philadelphia.

               Now leaving aside the identification of the “they’ from Philadelphia, the bottom line is that the gentleman who waited for hours to apply for CCW did it for God knows what reason, but when he was asked to explain his behavior to a reporter (representing the ‘main-stream’ media no less) he fell back on the same rationale for CCW that Gun Nation has been promoting for the last thirty years.  And a majority of Americans who are asked why they own guns and whether guns make them safer buy that same argument, hook, line and sinker.  It turns out, of course, that most legal gun owners tend to live in low-crime areas and the number of people who actually use guns to defend themselves from criminal attacks are an infinitesimally tiny proportion of the population who claim that the benefit of gun ownership outweighs the risk.

So why do so many Americans believe a story about guns that runs contrary to what gun violence research shows again and again to be true?  Because to the extent that people who own guns spend any time thinking about why they own guns beyond the fact that they enjoy owning and playing around with guns, they are going to repeat what they hear, and what they hear is what the NRA tells them again and again.

I am a member both of the NRA and the AARP.  I get three times as much mail and emails from the NRA as I get from AARP.  And the NRA makes me feel special and unique because I own guns.  The only thing that makes me special to the AARP is that I have lived past their minimum membership age.  And the idea that guns are a risk?  Hell, I never shot myself or anyone else.

The problem faced by the GVP community is that, like it or not, most of their proposals for reducing gun violence are sensible and realistic, but they still require me to change my behavior in some way or another in order to enjoy my guns. And frankly, I don’t want to be told about changing my behavior by someone who doesn’t own guns.  Why should I change my behavior?  I haven’t done anything wrong with my guns. 

The GVP uses evidence-based research to compete against a slick marketing campaign. Maybe they should take on the NRA by selling, not just explaining their message.  You think an outfit like Saatchi & Saatchi couldn’t take forty million from Mayor Mike and figure out how to change hearts and minds? 

Get Ready For Battle With Your AR But Don’t Forget All Those Extras That Go With The Gun.

I bought my first AR-15 in 1978 and with a scope and sling the gun ran me about $600 bucks.  Which means that in today’s numbers, that gun should cost me about $1,500 bucks. And right after Sandy Hook, when it looked like a gun bill had a chance of squeaking through Congress and landing on Obama’s desk, prices for black guns did briefly flirt at the $1,500 mark. Then reality set in, everyone who wanted an AR owned an AR or maybe two ARs, the number of ‘new’ shooters coming into the market has never been more than a trickle, and AR prices went back down south.  Last year I bought a mint Colt H-Bar for $700 which a year earlier would have set me back at least thousand bucks.

              Had I waited until this year to enlarge my AR arsenal, I could have bought the whole wing-ding now for several hundred dollars less because multiple companies are now selling AR “kits” which, like the old ham radio kits that I bought as a kid for $29.95, enable me to build a complete gun from scratch.  I can also simply buy every single part from different suppliers, which will even save me a few more bucks, and all the instructions for assembling the gun are, of course, available on various internet websites. Or if I don’t want to bother to read anything, I can also watch a video which claims to show me every step that I need to follow to build an AR for less than $500 bucks.

Let me quickly clarify the legal issues involved in building your own gun.  In fact, these AR kits are firearms that need to be purchased through a federally-licensed dealer because they come with a part known as the receiver which contains a specific serial number and is, under law, the part which makes a gun a gun.  Every firearm has a receiver, it’s the part which normally holds the trigger and is the foundation, if you will, for assembling the entire gun.  But if you know someone with some good milling equipment you can make your own receiver, and if you don’t transfer this part to anyone else, then under law you have not actually manufactured a firearm which means you don’t have to register the gun at all.

The reason that you can’t buy a kit to make a Glock or a Sig is because the design and functioning of those guns is protected by trademarks and copyrights, so anyone who attempted to make home-grown parts for a Sig 226 would find himself quickly facing a legal suit.  But the AR consists of what is referred to as ‘mil-spec’ parts, none of which are any more protected by trademark or copyright and all of which are manufactured by hundreds of small machining companies who just make sure that the part they produce is exactly the size required to fit into any AR gun.

So where does this leave the gun industry if anyone can put together their own version of America’s most popular gun at half the price that the same gun commands when it’s sitting on a dealer’s shelf?  Where it leaves the gun industry is in a happy place because the real attraction of the AR is that it can take a multitude of accessories, many of which cost more than the gun itself, are manufactured cheap as hell overseas and, best of all, don’t require any kind of point-of-sale licensing at all.  I just received a Shop Now email from Optics Planet with links to 118 products which I can use to ‘deck out’ my AR.  An Aimpoint red dot scope, front and rear Troy folding battle sights, a Mission First tactical grip and a Blackhawk sling will set me back around $900 (almost twice the price of the gun) or I can go whole hog and slap on a Trijicon ACOG for a thousand bucks.

And what will I do with my battle-ready AR when it’s all decked out?  Stick it in the closet with all my other guns.

 

Take A Look At Some Interesting Public Health Research About Gun Violence.

               I like it when public health research on gun violence gets in the way of Gun Nation’s continued effort to pretend that the only thing which stands between America and Armageddon is a good guy with a gun.  So I think it’s important now and again to highlight some recent gun violence scholarship, even though by including a handful of important articles I am forced to omit others that are of equal importance to the field.  Feel free to download any of the articles mentioned here.

               Article #1.  “Lethal means access and assessment among suicidal emergency department patients” is a study of more than 1,300 emergency patients across the country who either reported suicide thoughts or actually attempted suicide in the week prior to their ED visit, of whom 11% reported having at least one, if not more than one gun in their home. Of the gun-owning suicidal patients, 22% considered using a gun as their chosen suicidal method, with only medication scoring higher among this group as the preferred way to bring their lives to an end.  Among the emergency population that did not own guns, only 6% reported thoughts about using a gun to end their lives.  Pills have a 5% success rate for suicide, with guns the death rate is 90%. Get it?

               Article #2. “Firearm-related hospitalization and risk for subsequent violent injury, death, or crime perpetration” is a comparison of the frequency of hospitalization for victims of gun violence when compared with the population that is hospitalized for an injury not involving guns.  The study looked at patient outcomes for more than 9,000 violent injuries and 68,000 non-violent injuries, of whom 680 were classified as FRH or firearm-related hospitalizations.  And what was learned from this study, which was the first to look comprehensively at medical histories of patients shot with guns? “Hospitalization for a firearm-related injury is associated with a heightened risk for subsequent violent victimization

or crime perpetration.” Gee, what a surprise.

               Article #3.  “Long-term mortality of patients surviving firearm violence” deals with the degree to which being injured by a gun increases the possibility of early death.  What makes this study significant is that the researchers compared five-year outcomes following hospital discharge of 516 patients who sustained gun wounds, 992 vehicle accident injuries and 695 assaults where no gun was involved. What they found was that five-year, post-discharge mortality rates were significantly higher among gun assault victims and other assault victims as opposed to patients who were injured in accidents involving cars.  But while the 5-year mortality rates for gun and non-gun assaults were similar, a greater proportion of the victims of gun assaults died within one year of their initial hospital release.  Most of these early gun-injury deaths were – you guessed it – gun homicides.  In other words, if someone leaves the hospital after getting shot, they have some unfinished business which usually ends up with them getting shot again.

               Article #4.  “Social networks and the risk of gunshot injury” goes beyond the usual epidemiological data that drives public health research and looks at group behaviors which influence gun violence on a community-wide scale.  For this article the researchers studied two inner-city Boston neighborhoods with high rates of violent crime and utilized data from the Boston PD Field Intelligence Observation unit to construct the social networks linking the population which was most likely to be criminally involved with guns.  What they found was that using standard demographic categories (income, race) to define a population as high-risk for gun violence was not as important as understanding how individuals were situated in social networks where gun violence frequently occurred.

               Four studies, each of which fills important gaps in our knowledge about violence caused by guns. Four studies, which if it were up to Gun Nation would never be funded, would never see the light of day. Four studies, which whether we are talking about suicide, homicide, assault or combinations of all three, remind us again that you don’t protect anyone from anything by walking around with a gun.

                

Want To Know Why People Like Guns? Because Adults Need Toys Too.

If there’s one thing that gets the noses of Gun Nation out of joint, it’s when I refer to guns as ‘adult toys.’  It generates a mountain of outraged emails every time: “How dare you call the thing I use to protect myself and my family a toy?”  “I’ll bet you’ve never owned a real gun!”  “It’s people like you who want Americans to believe that we don’t need self-defense tools.”  And so forth, and so on.

But the truth is, the gun industry itself has begun to promote its products in the same way, and if you don’t believe me, just take a look at the NSSF website promoting its first Shooting Sports Fantasy Camp, to be held this week in Las Vegas for 30 lucky campers, a joyous, three-day wonderment which happens to be all sold out.  But don’t worry, you can leave your name on the website and you will be notified when future Fantasy Camps take place.

Here’s what you get for the paltry sum of three grand:  a room at the Aliante Casino-Hotel, transportation from the airport to the hotel, meals, a cocktail reception, a goody-bag filled with all kinds of souvenirs, a video of your camp experience and, most of all, 4 shooting sessions and all the 9mm ammunition you need.  I guess campers have to bring their own guns, although maybe not because the Clark County range also rents guns.

Now here’s the real deal.  The campers will be joined by “six of the top pro shooters in the world,” including the husband and wife Miculek team; Julie Golub, who makes those adorable NSSF videos explaining why gun safety is something the whole family needs to understand; KC Eusebio, who represents an ammunition company, and several more award-winning, competitive shooters.  All of the camp instructors come out of the USPSA environment; those are the ‘practical’ shooting folks who run around and blast away at various targets which simulates the how’s and why’s of defending yourself with a gun. Which is, I guess, why the weekend is called a ‘fantasy’ camp.

Incidentally, I don’t know how much things have improved at the Clark County shooting range, but back in 2014 the County Commissioners reluctantly ponied up 30 grand of taxpayer dollars to do a marketing push because the range had lost money every year since it opened in 2009.   The granddaddy of all these shooting camps is Thunder Ranch, which has gone through several changes in ownership due to the fact that, when all is said and done, it’s just not that easy to find a lot of people who are willing to shlep all the way to Oregon to do exactly the same thing that they can do either at a local shooting club or, if they have enough space, in their own backyard.

I got my first toy gun when I was six years old.  It was a plastic replica of the Colt Single Action Army revolver and I spent hours practicing my fast-draw techniques with this gun, and made sure I was always wearing my Roy Rogers ‘official’ cowboy hat along with my leather holster and belt.  The fact that I was standing in front of an apartment building in the middle of New York City didn’t bother me at all.  For that matter, I may have seen John Wayne pulling out his six-shooter in the middle of the Wild West, but in fact he was standing in the middle of a movie lot not far removed from Sunset and Vine.

Know why these folks are going out to the NSSF Fantasy Camp?  Not because they are worried about the 2nd Amendment, not because they are worried about Hillary grabbing their guns, not because they want to make sure that their gun ‘rights’ make them free.  They are going out there because it’s fun.  And what makes it fun?  Exactly what the NSSF says – it’s a fantasy.  And believe me, if it wasn’t a fantasy that some adults enjoy, the gun business would long ago have disappeared.

 

Who Wins When Harvard University Goes Up Against Ruger? Neither One.

You know the gun business is a serious business when someone writes about it in the Harvard Business Review.  And thanks to my friend Shaun Dakin, I just finished reading an article about the gun business published in the latest issue of HBR whose author, Robert Dolan, is a member of the Harvard Business School faculty.

Actually, the article is basically an update of a business school case study that Dolan published in 2013 which, although Dolan claims makes him someone who has studied the gun industry “in depth from a management perspective,” is actually an analysis of one company, Ruger, whose CEO, Michael Fifer, happens to hold a Harvard MBA degree.

Dolan’s article argues that gun companies should redefine their business practices to go beyond concerns for the bottom line and move from ‘management’ to ‘leadership’ by taking a more active role in making sure that company products are only used in safe and lawful ways.  Rather than just complying with gun laws, Ruger and other companies should take some of their profits and bring ’smart guns’ to market, expand programs that curtail straw sales and more closely monitor gun dealers who let their guns get into the ‘wrong hands.’

Even though Dolan attempts to validate his approach by invoking the legendary Peter Drucker (as if you can publish a Harvard case study without mentioning Drucker) there’s little here that can’t be found in many other calls for more gun industry responsibility, beginning with President Obama and moving on down. The Clinton Administration tried to get the gun industry to adopt all those ideas in 1998, and what they got for their efforts was a boycott of Smith & Wesson and then a law protecting the industry from class-action torts that was signed by George W. Bush in 2005.

To understand how the gun industry views Dolan’s argument for transitioning from management to leadership, you can find a response just below his comment from none other than Larry Keane, who happens to be the Senior Vice President of the NSSF. Keane begins his response by noting that “there is so much wrong in [Dolan’s] piece that it is hard to know where to begin.”  Actually, Dolan’s case study on Ruger contains more errors than his op-ed (including the extraordinary claims that the value of Ruger stock increased by more than ten times between 2008 and 2013), but Keane wants to make sure that everyone understands the basic idea that either you know the truth about the gun business or you don’t; and if you say anything negative about the gun business, you don’t.

Keane argues that policing the gun industry should be done by the police; i.e., law enforcement agencies like the ATF.  It’s a disingenuous argument at best, a wholesale fabrication at worst.  The Tiahart Amendment that severely curtails the ability of law enforcement to track illegal guns was not, as he claims, based on misrepresentation of gun-trace data by GVP advocates; it was nothing more than a successful effort to hamper government’s effort to regulate the gun industry through stricter enforcement of the distribution chain.

On the other hand, Professor Dolan is engaging in his own brand of wishful thinking by assuming that the gun industry is ready, willing or able to regulate itself.  Detroit didn’t begin installing seatbelts until the Federal Government mandated their use; the money spent by the gun industry to lobby against government regulations is a trifle compared to what the tobacco industry spends to stave off more government rules on cigarette sales.  If Dolan wants to write an interesting case study on the gun business, perhaps he should examine how and why the gun business has kept the regulators under control.

The GVP community rightfully takes umbrage at the degree to which the gun business has insulated itself from government mandates or controls, but the industry is just doing what comes naturally – no business owner wants the government to tell him what to do.

Was The Civil War Our Bloodiest Time? Maybe Not As Bloody As Today.

We usually think of the Civil War as the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history based on the number of men who went off to fight and never returned home.  The definitive book on how this veritable avalanche of death changed American social culture was written by the historian Drew Gilpin Faust, who otherwise spends her days running a little university in Cambridge, Mass.  Her book describes how in just four years, more than 600,000 men perished at a time when the country’s total population (including slaves) was slightly above 31 million.

To put this into perspective, total mortality in World War II was 405,000 out of a national population count of 132 million.  In other words, in the conflict with the second-highest number of casualties, the mortality rate was .003 percent.  The Civil War mortality percentage was .019, almost ten times the casualty rate of World War II.  And in fact, the Civil War numbers may be understated, according to recent scholarly publications, by as much as 25%. Wow!

Given my interest in the medical response to gun violence, I decided to look at the Civil War data in a little more depth.  First, and this is a well-known fact, two-thirds of all Civil War mortality, perhaps even higher on the rebel side, were not from battlefield injuries, but from contagious diseases which spread like veritable wildfire among stationery troops.  The biggest killer was typhus, which continued to decimate armies up through World War I.   Next in line was ‘acute diarrhea,’ followed by dysentery, pneumonia and various types of ‘fevers,’ that were classified as ‘miasmatic’ disease.

All of the above information and much more can be found in a remarkable document, The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, a 6,000-page collection that was prepared and published by the United States Surgeon General five years after the war came to an end.  Most of the data was collected from military medical units that were located at or near the battlefields themselves, or ran the military hospitals that sprang up in larger cities, particularly Washington, D.C.  By war’s end there were more than 20,000 beds in military hospitals in and around the nation’s capital, one of which happened to provide a bed for my mother when she gave birth in 1944 to me.

Roughly 90,000 men in the Union army were killed in battle or died from gunshot injuries either during or after they were being treated for their wounds.  The figure has to be used with caution because, in fact, the numbers for troops who lost their lives while fighting did not come from the Surgeon General, but from the Office of Adjutant General, which was responsible for verifying battle deaths in order to figure out pension/survivor benefits during and after the war.

Now check this out.  In fact, physicians and surgeons treated more than 235,000 cases of gunshot wounds over the course of the conflict, of which less than 15% ultimately died.  That would be a pretty impressive case fatality ratio for what was the birth of trauma surgery, except that roughly 70% of all gun wounds were to the extremities, particularly arms and hands, two areas of the body which are not particularly vulnerable to injuries which lead to death.  What this reflected, Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg notwithstanding, was that most battles involved troops who were stationed behind stone walls or in trenches with the torso well out of sight.

If we could construct a case fatality ratio covering contemporary gun violence, I would suspect that current numbers might be worse.  The best we can do is compare fatal to non-fatal gun injuries from the CDC, which shows a ratio of the former to the latter of 16%. Which might mean that guns are much more lethal today than they were in America’s bloodiest war, and by the way, compare an annual average of 22,500 gun deaths during the Civil War to 30,000+ gun deaths today.  Were the years 1861-1865 America’s bloodiest time?  I’m not so sure.