Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 94

Score A Big ‘W’ For GVP Laws In The Centennial State.

               Back in 2013 two new gun laws took effect in Colorado which extended background checks to just about all weapons transfers and also banned the purchase of high-capacity gun magazines.  The laws were a response to the Aurora movie theater shooting the previous year that left 12 people dead and 70 injured and earned the shooter, James Holmes, twelve life sentences and an additional 3,318 years.

            The law was immediately attacked by the usual coalition of gun-nut groups; i.e., NRA, 2nd Amendment Sisters, blah, blah and blah, who took to the legal ramparts to defend their precious 2nd Amendment rights.  A concurrent suit was also filed by 55 Colorado sheriffs who claimed that the law was unenforceable and therefore should not be allowed to stand. In 2014 District Court Judge Marcia upheld both laws, stating that neither infringed on the 2nd Amendment or anything else.

            Today the 10th Circuit ruled that the initial finding by the District Court was correct and went further, dismissing the both appeals because the appellants could not prove any ‘standing’ in either case. In order to bring a case of this sort into Federal court, the plaintiffs have to demonstrate that they were harmed by the law which they are challenging, or would face imminent harm.  Without such proof, the plaintiffs don’t have ‘standing’ in the case, or what we might call skin in the game.

            To show you how much the plaintiffs in this case were being damaged by these laws, it’s worth examining their specific claims in each case.  As to the injuries that might be caused by limiting magazine capacities to 15 rounds, the plaintiffs were represented by someone named Elisa Dahlberg who said she owned two 30-round magazines and one 17-round magazine, all of which were grandfathered in under the 2013 law but, according to Ms. Dahlberg, might eventually “wear out” and thus could not be replaced.  But since Ms. Dahlberg did not testify that she was going to purchase a new hi-capacity magazine, nor did she even have any plans as to when she might try to buy a new hi-cap mag, she had not been injured by the law nor did she face the imminent possibility that she might wind up being prosecuted in court.  And that meant she had no standing to bring this case.

            As to the damage from background checks, the plaintiffs produced the secretary of a Colorado chapter of Outdoor Buddies, which happens to be a wonderful organization that helps disabled individuals enjoy the outdoors.  And basically what this guy said was that a disabled individual might want to borrow a gun to go hunting but would encounter difficulties if borrowing the weapon created the need to engage in an immediate background check.  Except that not only does the Colorado background check law include exemptions for temporary loans of guns, but just like Ms. Dahlberg who hadn’t yet decided that she actually was going to need more hi-cap magazines, the Outdoor Buddies had yet to take a disabled person out to the woods who actually needed to borrow a gun.

            What I find interesting in this case is the degree to which the gun-nut community goes hog-wild every time they sniff the slightest threat to their so-called Constitutional ‘rights,’ but when push comes to shove, they can’t show that their rights have been damaged at all. In fact, in this particular case, the plaintiffs couldn’t even find anyone who gave one rat’s damn about exercising their gun rights, at least the gun rights that were allegedly being circumscribed by these draconian laws.

            As to the sheriffs and their defense of the 2nd Amendment, in order to have skin in the game they had to show that carrying out these laws created a ‘credible threat of prosecution’ but in their own testimony the sheriffs admitted that not one of them faced any prosecutorial threats of any kind at all.  Which meant that their legal challenge also got tossed, which means that both Colorado laws remain in full force.

Should We Compare Civilian Gun Violence To Military Gun Violence? You’ll Learn How Violent We Really Are.

            I was at a hospital conference this morning where the speaker happened to mention that gun violence claimed more American lives since 1968 than were lost in every military engagement fought by U.S. troops since the country began. And while this is a shocking notion – the idea that we are more the victims of our own violence than the violence suffered when our country is at war with other countries – I decided to take a deeper look at those numbers, in particular the gun injury numbers from the Civil War.

            Why look at the Civil War?  For two reasons.  First, in terms of wartime deaths, it was far and away the costliest war of all.  We used to think that the final toll was somewhere over 500,000; that number was recently revised upwards to 750,000, which appears to be closer to the real mark. But this global number hides a significant issue that must be explained when it comes to comparing war deaths to civilian gun violence, namely, that two-thirds of the soldiers who died between 1861 and 1865 were victims not of wounds from warfare, but died from diseases caused by unsanitary conditions on and off the battlefield, and at least another 15% died from other causes not related to battle engagements at all.  In fact, it is estimated that only 20% of all the men who died on both sides during the Civil War actually were killed during the fighting itself.

            According to the Congressional Record Service, and I tend to think their research on all issues is about as valid as any research can be, the total number of battle deaths suffered by U.S. troops since 1775 is 575,000.  This number excludes casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan, and also doesn’t count Confederate soldiers who lost their lives between 1861 and 1865.  Throw them into the overall figure and we are still something just beyond 600,000 victims of gun violence in warfare over the entire history of the United States.  According to the CDC, the total number of gun deaths for the civilian population of the United States since 1999 is 497,632.  And everyone thinks that gun violence has claimed more lives than Americans lost in battle if we go back to 1968?  Give me a friggin’ break. How about just go back to 1995?

            I don’t think that comparing civilian gun deaths to overall military fatalities is a valid comparison at all.  For the simple reason that men and women in uniform die from all sorts of causes, natural and otherwise, which may have nothing to do with whether they were victims of hostile fire or not.  Soldiers are not infrequent victims of accidents in training, military suicides may be declining lately but they are certainly not unknown.  As far as we can tell, the great flu pandemic of 1918 probably first infected Western countries from an outbreak in a military base in France. The ratio of all military deaths to combat deaths in all American wars is in the neighborhood of 2:1. The percentage of marines killed in Desert Shield – Deseret Storm, of all the Devil Dogs serving in the Gulf, was one-one hundredth of one percent. Hell, you would have been safer walking around with the 1st Cavalry Division in Wadi Al-Batin than traipsing down Prospect Avenue in the South Bronx.

            Know what?  I’m sick of the 2nd Amendment and I’m sick of all the dopes and dupes who email me nonstop to remind me that the 2nd Amendment gives them the ‘right’ to protect themselves with a gun.  Because the truth is that the number of people who successfully use a gun to protect themselves and everyone else is about as many as the number of troops who lost their lives protecting Kuwait from Saddam Hussein.  Which by no means should be taken as even the slightest rebuke of those who participated in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91. But carrying a weapon into battle and carrying a weapon as you walk through Walmart just isn’t the same thing.      

How Do You Convince People That Guns Are A Risk? Maybe By Not Talking About Guns.

           In the face of more than 100,000 serious injuries and deaths every year, it’s pretty difficult to accept the idea that gun violence isn’t a public health issue, yet promoters and defenders of gun ownership continue to insist otherwise.  And while it would be easy to assume that such warped thinking is the product of infantile and/or uninformed minds, medical and public health communities have been spectacularly unsuccessful trying to convince Americans that guns constitute a risk to health.  In fact, both Gallup and Pew polls indicate that a majority think that guns protect us from crime, even while the same majority also support expanded background checks.

In light of the divergence between public health research findings on the one hand, and public opinion in the other, I am beginning to think that perhaps the problem lies not in the power and messaging of Gun Nation, but reflects the possibility that perhaps public health research should stop focusing so much energy on the public aspects of gun violence and spend more time thinking about the health aspects of the problem, in particular, the issue of why people own and use guns.

Because there would be no gun violence if a certain number of people each year didn’t misbehave with their guns.  And the issue of behavior is never far removed from the manner in which the medical profession deals with disease. The mortality numbers for serious illnesses would be much different if we changed behaviors like smoking, excess eating and drinking which cause heart disease and cancer which leads to medical distress.

The medical response to behavior which leads to gun morbidity, however, seems to largely put the cart before the horse. Doctors are being advised to counsel patients on safe gun storage, as if gun violence will be ‘cured’ by locking the guns up or locking them away.  I’m not against safe storage, but less than 4% of gun injuries occur because a child grabbed an unlocked, loaded gun.  The overwhelming amount of gun violence, for which the medical costs alone are estimated to be at least $50 billion each year, takes place because someone made the conscious decision to use their gun to injure either themselves or someone else.  And that decision is rarely going to bear on whether the gun is locked away.

Last year a public health research team conducted a survey of 4,000 adults of whom one-third reported owning guns.  Half of the gun-owning group also reported that they engaged in social activities involving guns with either family members or friends. Which meant that for these folks the ownership of guns goes far beyond believing that guns make them safe.

To people for whom gun ownership is how they create their social milieu, guns represent honesty, patriotism, family and other cultural artifacts which form a basis for self-expression and communication between family members and friends. So when such folks perceive a threat to their ownership of guns, this perception quickly becomes a threat to their self-identity as well.  Which means that trying to prove that guns are a risk will only push such individuals to harden their resistance against losing their guns.

“If individuals adopt one position or another because of what guns mean instead of what guns do, then empirical data are unlikely to have much effect on the gun debate.”  To me, this statement by Don Braman and Dan Kahan neatly sums up much of what has characterized the gun debate over the last several decades.

Please don’t misunderstand – I’m not opposed to empirical research. But it’s one thing to argue the case for gun risk by citing data which shows that gun injuries increase in homes where there are more guns; it’s another thing to convince individual gun owners that such a finding might apply to any of them. Want to counsel a patient about whether his guns represent medical risk?  You’ll have to figure out how to do it using language which isn’t perceived as a threat.

Trauma Surgeons Take On Gun Violence But I Have A Question About Their Approach.

               Last year the American College of Surgeons was one of eight national medical organizations that endorsed a ‘Call to Action,’ an important step forward for bringing the medical community back into the gun violence debate. Physicians felt less than welcome when CDC-funded gun research was cut off in 1997; they felt even more marginalized after Florida passed a law in effectively gagging doctors who wanted to counsel patients about guns. So the 2015 manifesto by eight medical organizations (plus the American Bar Association) was a welcome signal that the nation’s healthcare providers were once again prepared to lend their energies to finding solutions to deaths and injuries caused by guns.

            Now one of those eight organizations, the American College of Surgeons – Committee on Trauma, has taken this issue to the next level and issued their own strategy for firearm injury prevention, or what they refer to as a “consensus” approach to preventing gun deaths.  When it comes to gun injuries, trauma surgeons represent medicine’s “front line” because their skills and techniques are usually what maintains someone’s life after they have been shot.  The evidence is difficult to analyze on this point, but I suspect that one of the major reasons that gun mortality continues to drop while overall gun injuries continue to rise is due to what goes on in a trauma center after the shooting victim is wheeled in.

            The violence reduction strategy being advanced by trauma surgeons marks a new approach in one major respect because it calls for trauma centers to become not just places where shooting victims are treated for their injuries, but locations that “focus on developing and implementing evidence based violence prevention programs.”  Such a pro-active approach recognizes that gun violence victims are often serial victims of violence in general, they tend to come back to trauma units frequently over time. The trauma surgeon is often the last physician who consults with a shooting victim before the patient is discharged and thus should be counseling the patient on the risks of continuing a life-style which encourages further violence and will no doubt result in a reappearance in the trauma unit again.

            Evidently there is a division of opinion among trauma surgeons as regards the whole issue of gun violence, because this new, pro-active approach being suggested by the Committee on Trauma reflects what the Committee finds to be a “significant controversy” among surgeons regarding “two dominant contrasting narratives” about the role and value of guns.  One narrative, according to the Committee, views guns as an ‘emblem’ of personal liberty; the other views guns as an ‘emblem’ of violence. The Committee believes that the gap between these two narratives can be combined by creating a new narrative which they call ‘freedom with responsibility.’ In other words, guns make us ‘free’ as long as we use them in a ‘responsible’ way.

            I have been following the bandying about of various calls for freedom by Gun Nation for the last twenty or thirty years and with all due respect to the serious and thoughtful effort by the Committee on Trauma to find a new path that will achieve some degree of consensus on both sides, I’m not sure that their concerns for acknowledging the need for gun-owning freedom are all that well placed. I am no constitutional scholar by any means, but freedom to me has nothing to do with how I feel about it or what kind of emblems I tote around to express my desire to be ‘free.’ 

            As far as I am concerned, freedom means one thing and one thing only, and that is the rule of law.  It’s law that keeps us free and it’s law which defines our public behavior in every respect, including how we own and use guns.  Have you noticed lately that Gun Nation and its noisy political acolytes like Donald Trump never tire of reminding us that gun violence won’t be solved with more laws?

            Freedom and responsibility?  How about just responsibility?   

           

           

           

 

Does The 2nd Amendment Protect You? Not If You Don’t Own A Gun.

Having secured the right to own firearms without being required to do military service, Gun Nation is busily trying to widen the boundaries of the 2nd Amendment by claiming that ‘open carry’ is also a legal right.  Now let’s forget for a moment that the 2008 Heller decision specifically referred only to keeping a handgun within the home, even though most states also grant residents concealed-carry privileges with or without any special approval process, so for Gun Nation uncontested concealed-carry has also become an unquestioned ‘right.’  But in some states, Texas being the most newsworthy in this regard, gun ownership now also includes openly carrying guns which has become a further extension of gun ‘rights.’

              So the bottom line is that Gun Nation is pushing the idea that walking around with a gun would be no different than walking around with a droid.  Except it’s pretty hard to hurt yourself or anyone else with a cell phone, while it’s pretty easy to hurt yourself or someone else with a gun.  To which, of course, Gun Nation replies that: a) guns are important ‘tools’ for self-defense; and b) the 2nd Amendment gives us the Constitutional ‘right’ to own a gun. Incidentally, when I was in USRA, nobody ever referred to my M-1 rifle or my 1911 pistol as a ‘tool.’ Of all the ways that Gun Nation tries to disguise the fact that guns are simply a lethal product that do a lot more harm than good, the notion that all those armed citizens are protecting us with their ‘tools’ has to be the dumbest and most childish justification of all.  Anyway, back to Constitutional rights.

Even though I own more than 60 guns and would hate to see the day that I couldn’t own any more, I have never felt the slightest desire or concern to protect or even believe in the 2nd Amendment as some kind of Constitutional right.  Obviously it’s in the Bill of Rights, so my guns are protected by Constitutional stricture whether I like it or not.  But when the NRA tells me that the 2nd Amendment is my “first freedom,” when an amateur huckster like C.J. Gresham says that restricting open carry is an ‘infringement’ of his 2nd Amendment rights, I think it’s time to sit down and once and for all try to figure out what the 2nd Amendment really protects.

I’m not a Constitutional expert and I certainly wouldn’t presume to know more about the 2nd Amendment than what has been written by eminent jurists like the late Antonin Scalia or respected scholars like Stephen Halbrook, Sanford Levinson or Don Kates.  But when I look at the 2nd Amendment as an Article in the Bill of Rights, one thing jumps out at me which the gun debate seems to have overlooked, namely, that it is the only Article in the entire document that protects only a certain group of individuals, namely, people who decide to own guns. Every other Amendment guarantees protections to everyone, whether it’s speech, religion, assembly, due process, trial by jury or payment for private property that is taken for public use. But if I decide not to own a gun, and that decision happens to be shared by a majority of Americans, then the 2nd Amendment means nothing to me.

Which is why the claim by Gun Nation that the 2nd Amendment guarantees ‘our’ freedom is nothing but pure bunk. Which is also why the open-carry idiots who paraded around the SXSW festival in Texas were supporting nothing more than the right to act like jerks in public which, thanks to the 1st Amendment, is a Constitutional right we all enjoy.

If the pro-gun community wants to pretend that everyone derives a benefit from the 2nd Amendment, that’s all fine and well.  But the GVP community should make it clear that those 27 words and the guns those words protect have nothing to do with them at all.

 

Can You Still Buy A Gun On Facebook? Yup, You Sure Can.

            Matt Drange has just published an article that should be required reading for everyone in GVP.  Because basically what Matt did was the follow up on Facebook’s decision to ban private gun sales from the perspective of wanting to see whether, in effect, the ban has made any difference at all.  And while it is virtually impossible to quantify how many Facebook pages were devoted to gun sales either pre or post the January ban, it is clear that many of the Facebook sellers have managed to continue selling internet guns either explicitly on Facebook or through other, somewhat disguised means.

            I happen to be a member of a private Facebook gun group which I joined not because I wanted to buy or sell guns, but as one of many resources I use to check the ups and downs of the gun market as a whole.  I never felt all that comfortable using the monthly FBI-NICS numbers as a guide to overall gun sales, in particular because NICS obviously doesn’t catch many private transactions, plus the 4473 NICS form doesn’t distinguish between the sale of new and used guns.  But I find that a much more sensitive barometer for the ebb and flow of gun commerce (true of all commerce) is price, so when the selling price of AR-15 rifles dropped by more than 30% between 2013 and 2015 I knew that the tactical gun craze had come to an end.

            What Drange discovered by joining more than two dozen Facebook gun groups was that most of the groups are still doing business as usual simply by making it more difficult for Facebook viewers who aren’t members of the particular group to identify the group’s page.  And the easiest way to do this is to change the page’s name so that a search for pages using terms like ‘guns’ or ‘AR’ or something else relevant to Gun Nation won’t come up.  The administrator of my group simply took the name, replaced every other letter with a symbol and that was the end of that.

            The truth is that the only way internet gun sales can be effectively ended is by making it illegal to sell guns on the net.  But that creates a whole bunch of other issues because most internet gun sales are conducted on legitimate, online websites like Bud’s Gun Shop or Impact Guns, which ship to licensed dealers and do not offer space for private sales.  And even the notorious Armslist which encourages listings by private sellers, is actually utilized more by licensed-dealers who want to avoid the hassle of administering their own site. I can’t imagine any piece of legislation could be crafted that would satisfy all the different issues raised by pro-gun and anti-gun groups.

            But the bigger problem is the degree to which any legislation restricting legal commerce in guns will be effective given the fact that just about everyone in America can legally own a gun.  In that respect, a new study has just been published which evaluates the degree to which state-level laws impact levels of gun violence (homicide and suicide) and the resulting conclusions are somewhat confusing, to say the least.  On the one hand, there appears to be an association between lower gun violence rates and universal background checks both on guns and ammunition sales, but the state laws which appear to have the greatest impact on reducing gun violence are laws requiring ballistic fingerprinting or microstamping, otherwise known as firearms identification. 

            There’s only one little problem. The two states where firearm identification reduced gun violence rates, Florida and Alaska, have no firearm identification laws at all.  Which makes me wonder about any attempt to use regression analysis between laws and behavioral outcomes unless the law in question regulates the behavior itself.  And since the behavior that leads to gun violence is basically the ownership of guns, what difference will gun laws really make?

Want To Avoid Gun Accidents? Don’t Touch Your Guns.

               Guess what?  If you take the trouble to lock your guns away or put a lock in each individual gun, you are safer than if you don’t.  This is the conclusion of a new study whose senior author, Dr. Frederick Rivara, has produced a long and distinguished list of indispensable peer-reviewed publications in the field of gun violence.  In fact, you could probably say that Dr. Rivara is one of the founders of the public health approach to understanding the risks of gun ownership. 

               Unfortunately, figuring out how many Americans each year are victims of gun violence is one thing, figuring out what to do about it is something else.  And for a whole bunch of reasons, the strategies that public health has developed and employed to mitigate other injuries (car accidents, backyard pools, household poisons) don’t seem to have worked as well when it comes to guns. In 2001, the CDC estimates that the number of fatal and non-fatal unintentional gun injuries was 18,498; in 2013 the number was 17,369.  That’s a drop obviously, particularly when we consider that the civilian gun arsenal has increased by perhaps as much as 50% over the same period of years.  But it’s not the end of the world by any means.

               The good news, on the other hand, is that the medical profession seems willing to get itself back into the center of the gun debate which, if we agree that gun violence is a public health issue, is where doctors belong.  Last year eight major medical organizations issued a ‘Call to Action,’ basically promoting more medical engagement in dealing with gun violence and leading public health researchers have also published editorials advising physicians about the cultural challenges they face in counseling patients about guns.

               So the medical community appears to be moving towards consensus about the need for doctors to talk to patients about gun safety, focusing in particular on safe storage as a way to cut down on accidental injuries and deaths.  The only problem with this approach is that the outcomes of safe storage campaigns studied by Dr. Rivara and his colleagues does not really indicate that such programs necessarily work.  In fact, of the seven safe storage programs evaluated, it turns out that only four “were effective at promoting safe firearm storage practices,” and one of those studies which provided free gun safes to Eskimo villagers only resulted in residents adding a piece of furniture to their homes but did not substantially alter whether guns were kept locked or unloaded in each home.

               Even if the evaluations of safe storage programs had not yielded such ambiguous results, I have a more fundamental problem with the whole notion that the medical response to unintentional gun injuries should be based on the idea that safe storage behavior makes any real difference at all.  Because if you look at the age breakdown of gun accident victims (and the data, of course, must be analyzed with care) the first thing you notice is that victims under the age of 15 represent less than 4% of accidental shootings as a whole. Which means that the folks who commit accidental shootings happen to be either the owners of the guns or friends of the gun owner who just make a stupid mistake when they pick up the gun.  Remember when Dick Cheney shot another hunter back in 2006? The guy just happened to be in his line of fire as Cheney was shouldering his 28-gauge because someone had flushed a quail.

               If physicians want to counsel patients about gun accidents, the first thing they need to do, and it has not yet been done, is to figure out why, how and when gun accidents actually occur. Because until we understand the behavior that leads to accidents, advising patients about how to store guns safely is truly putting the veritable cart before the veritable horse.  Don’t want to have a car accident?  Leave your car in the garage. 

What Happens When People Walk Around With Guns? People Get killed.

This week the Colorado legislature showed itself to still have enough members with brains to beat back the annual brain-dead attempt to ‘restore’ gun ‘rights’ to the good citizens of the Centennial State. The Colorado GVP community shot them all down. You may recall that in 2014 Colorado expanded background checks to cover private transactions, and while the pro-gun strategy this year did not include an attempt to repeal the background check law, it did include Gun Nation’s favorite gun-rights ploy; i.e., permitless concealed-carry, including on school grounds.

Speaking of the joys and virtues of concealed carry, our friends at the Violence Policy Center have just updated their website which contains data on gun fatalities committed by CCW-holders, with the number now standing at 863 non-defensive deaths since 2007.  Since there is no official count for how many of the 31,000+ gun deaths each year occur thanks to someone using a gun that was being legally carried around for self-defense, we have to assume that the VPC number is far below the real number, but that’s not the point.

The point is that I have been listening to this crap about the millions of times each year that legal CCW-holders use their guns to prevent crimes, and if this is really true, then what’s the difference if a few hundred or even a few thousand people kill themselves or kill someone else with their concealed-carry guns?  One of the brain-dead legislators in Colorado explained why state residents should be able to bring permitless concealed-carry guns into schools in the following way: “I, for one, am tired of sending my daughters to school on blind faith that they will return home from a place where people are prevented by state law from equipping themselves to protect my daughters.”  Okay, so this friggin’ dope can go lay brick.

But to give the all dopes their due, I decided to look into the situation a little further by trying to figure out whether, in fact, all these people walking round with a concealed gun are making our communities more safe.  And what better place to examine the situation than in Florida because, after all, the whole concealed-carry movement first erupted in the Gunshine State.  And according to the Florida Department of Agriculture, which issues CCW, there are now 1.5 million active concealed licenses, so Florida must be a pretty safe place, right?

Wrong.  Let me give you a few numbers.  In 2011, the metropolitan area with the highest violent crime rate in the entire United States wasn’t Chicago, wasn’t Philadelphia, it was Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Pompano Beach.  In 2014, that wonderful family vacation spot known as Orlando had a higher violent crime rate than Chicago or New York. I could go on like this but the truth is that the massive armed citizenry in Florida hasn’t been worth a damn when it comes to keeping the good citizens of that state free from crime.

But let’s drill down a little further and look specifically at the issue of how CCW guns are actually used for or against the commission of crimes.  According to the VPC, there have been at least 21 Floridians killed by CCW-holders since 2013, an average of 7 each year.  On the other hand, justifiable homicides, have averaged roughly 23 per year in Florida since ‘Stand Your Ground’ was passed in 2005.  But while gun homicides have increased since SYG, no other violent crime category showed any real change at all.

Now wait a minute.  I thought the whole point of concealed-carry is to make communities safe.  So how come in Florida of all places the number of people getting legally killed with guns keeps going up but the crime rate doesn’t go down?   Here’s the bottom line and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand what it means.  Know what happens when more people walk around with guns?  More people get killed.  Gee, that was hard to figure out.

Lesson From Flint: Hillary Vs. Bernie Or Hillary Vs. The NRA?

There has been a lot of back and forth between the Clinton and Sanders camps about the gun issue, with Clinton claiming that Sanders has been less than honest about his take on guns, and Sanders responding by touting his D- rating from the NRA as proof that he’s as much of a gun-grabber as Hillary wants to be.  I have to say from the gitgo that there would be no talk about gun violence in this campaign if we had waited for Bernie to bubble the issue up. This was Hillary’s impressive response to the shameful pro-gun pandering of the Republican candidates and her response alone;  I’m not saying that it makes her a better candidate overall than Sanders but I am saying that she deserves all the credit on this one, bar none.

              Be that as it may, I watched the Bernie-Hillary debate from Flint because I assumed that the gun issue would loom large, and loom it did about midway through the program when the father of one of the Kalamazoo victims had the following to say: “The man who shot everyone, including my daughter, in Kalamazoo, had no mental health issues recorded, and had a clear background. What do you plan to do to address this serious epidemic? I don’t want to hear anything about tougher laws for mental health or criminal backgrounds, because that doesn’t work.”

And Clinton, to her credit, went right to work first pushing for more comprehensive background checks, and then moving into a discussion of the immunity that gun makers have thanks to the 2005 law, known as PLCAA, which basically protects the industry from class-action suits.  I don’t know if it was coincidence or what, but the day before this debate, the New York Times ran an editorial on wrongful-death suit that the Sandy Hook parents have brought against Remington/Bushmaster, and while the text was a bit garbled, the bottom line is that the PLCAA law does not immunize the gun industry if they knowingly produce a product that is dangerous to the consumers who purchase the item, whether the product is acquired legally or not.

Everyone knows that Bernie voted against the 2005 law, claiming that it wouldn’t stop anyone from committing violence with a gun.  He also voted against the original Brady bill, basically for the same reason.  But this past January he signed on as a co-sponsor of the Schiff bill that would repeal the PLCAA, which is why the Brady Campaign just issued a press release wanting to know exactly where Sanders stands. Which brings us back to the comments he made in his debate appearance in Flint.

And basically what he said isn’t going to leave the GVP community feeling all warm and fuzzy when it comes to the Sanders approach to guns. Because on the issue of immunity for the gun industry, the Senator from Vermont basically believes that as long as a gun is acquired legally, that whatever the owner then does with that gun should not result in any liability for the manufacturer at all.  Otherwise, according to Sanders, holding the industry liable for how its products are used would “end gun manufacturing in America.”  He then went on to say that if the manufacturer of a gun was held liable if that gun fell into the wrong hands and someone got shot, then “essentially you are saying that there should not be any guns in America, period.” To which, incidentally, the NRA this morning tweeted that Bernie was “spot on.”

Let me break the news to you gently, Bernie.  There happen to be a lot of people in America who actually do believe that we’d all be better off without guns.  And I thought that the whole point of your ‘revolution’ was to say and do things differently from the way they are usually said and done. Mind telling me what’s so new and different about pushing a view on guns that the NRA has been promoting for the past twenty years?

 

A New Study Reveals How And When All Those Bad Guys Get Their Hands On Guns.

You may believe that the reason the NRA is so powerful is because of all the money they spread around Congress to block any sensible gun reforms. But that’s actually putting the cart before the horse, because what really makes them effective is the fact that a majority of shootings are classified as crimes, and Gun Nation has been very successful convincing everyone that they need to be concerned about crime and not about guns.

              It’s a hard argument to refute when the numbers are on their side. In 2013, the last year for numbers in every gun violence category, there were 117,613 killed or wounded with guns.  Of this total, just short of 80,000 were homicides or aggravated assaults, another 21,000 were suicides and the remainder, roughly 17,000, were accidents of whom more than 97% lived. The bottom line is that when we talk about gun violence, like it or not, we are talking about crime.

And the NRA never misses an opportunity to remind us that guns aren’t the problem, it’s the bad guys, the criminals who are the problem. And since everybody knows that criminals by definition don’t obey laws, why pass more gun laws, particularly when all you end up doing is making it more difficult for all those law-abiding gun owners to enjoy playing around with their guns?

Ever since Gun Nation discovered that hunting was on the wane, some new rationale had to be advanced to promote the ownership of guns.  And what better use for a gun than to keep it around just in case one of those bad guys comes crashing through a window or the back door? And if you then produce studies which shows that law-abiding Americans use guns several million times each year to protect themselves from all those bad guys, how can you go wrong?

You can go wrong if what you are saying has little, if anything, to do with the truth.  And in that regard the National Bureau of Economic Research has just published a study on teen-age criminality that should be required reading for everyone concerned about GVP. The NBER is an independent economic think-tank that, among other things, is mandated by Congress to tell us when recessions begin and when they end. NBER also looks at a wide variety of issues that affect American society, and one of the issues that obviously impacts our society is the issue of crime.  This particular study examined the various factors which lead teen-age boys to form what the authors refer to as criminal ‘partnerships’ which result in the commission of crimes.  These partnerships or networks appear to develop around age 14, and they result in much higher levels of criminal activity than what is committed by kids acting on their own.

Couple this information with studies on adolescent gun access and a very interesting picture begins to emerge.  Alan Lizotte found that boys start carrying guns around age 14 and “the amount of serious violent crime the boys committed during periods of active gun carrying was more than five times the amount they committed when they did not carry guns.”  And where do these two groups – gun carriers and crime partnerships – intersect?  Not so much in the neighborhood, not so much in the street corner, but in school.  The NBER found that of all the factors involving personal contact which then leads to crime, it is the degree to which these adolescent boys first connect with one another in the same classrooms to which they are assigned.

The NRA promotes gun safety education in schools so maybe we should take them at their word.  But instead of telling kids how to behave safely with guns, how about the NRA saying that they shouldn’t own a gun at all?  If school-age kids don’t start carrying around guns, they can’t turn into bad guys and without all those bad guys, the rest of us wouldn’t need guns. Simple, isn’t it?