Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 96

How Many People Get Shot By Cops? A Lot More Than You Think.

If you want to get a handle on the numbers involved in gun violence, you can go to two sources: the CDC or the FBI.  The numbers aggregated by the CDC come from coroner’s reports received by state health departments and then forwarded, analyzed and presented on the CDC website WISQARS, which tracks fatal and non-fatal injuries since 1999 and 2001, respectively. The other method is to use the crime data from the FBI, whose numbers begin in 1960 but become state-based beginning in 1985.

The data in these two reports is, to put it politely, somewhat diffuse.  Take one year for example, in this case 2005.  According to the FBI, 16,740 people were victims of murder or manslaughter, the CDC listed the total number of homicides as 18,124.  This 10% difference between the two numbers is more or less the same for every year in which both agencies report their numbers, and it reflects both different definitions (one is reporting medical events, the other reporting crimes) and both numbers are estimates reflecting the fact that state and local agencies which report the raw totals are not necessarily required to report anything at all.

Where things really get crazy is when we look at CDC and FBI numbers for what is referred to as homicide by ‘legal intervention,’ which is a polite way of saying that someone got shot by a cop.  In 2010, to choose a different year for comparison, the FBI put this number at 397; for the CDC it was 412.  For the years 2010 – 2014, the FBI says that 2,142 people were killed by law enforcement, the CDC number is 2,485.  So now we have a gap between the two estimates of nearly 15%, but that’s not even scratching the veritable surface when it comes to figuring out what’s what.

I was tipped off to this problem by a story in MedScape that focused on the research of a group at the Harvard School of Public Health who have been looking at the data on cop killings since 1960. They recently published an op-ed on this problem citing an enormous discrepancy between the ‘official’ numbers on legal intervention deaths and what is now being reported by, of all media outlets, The Guardian, which happens to be a newspaper published in the U.K. The reason I find this interesting is because cop killings in England are so rare that in 2013, police in the U.K. only shot off their duty weapons three times and, by the way, didn’t kill anyone at all.

The Guardian has created a website, The Counted, which has been collecting and publishing stories about legal interventions since 2015, and I have to tell you that the numbers are frighteningly higher than anything posted by the CDC or the FBI. In 2015 the site lists 1,140 persons killed by the police, so far in 2016 the number has reached 136.  At this rate the total for 2016 will only be 1,013, a 10% decrease from last year, but still more than twice as high as what we get from our usual sources at the FBI or the CDC. Actually, my friends at the Gun Violence Archive also post a daily count on what they call “officer involved shootings,’ and so far this year their death toll stands at 145.

I’ll leave the two aggregators to figure out whose number is more exact, but the bottom line is that cop killings are much higher than what is usually assumed to be the case, and they occur most frequently in African-American ghetto neighborhoods – gee, what a surprise! The problem with the data found in the Guardian’s website, however, is that it is very incomplete. Try filtering for any attribute – race, age, gender, weapon – the numbers fall way short. Deriving stories from media notices is one thing, aggregating objective data is something else. If public health researchers want to get their hands on real data they better be prepared to wait, and wait, and wait.

 

A Must-Read Report On Guns And Domestic Violence.

Two new GVP organizations, Prosecutors Against Gun Violence and The Consortium for Risk-Based Firearm Policy, have just produced a new report that deserves the widest possible distribution and discussion.  Entitled Firearm Removal/Retrieval in Cases of Domestic Violence, the report not only highlights the degree to which gun access makes domestic violent so much more violent and deadly, but also presents case studies on removal/retrieval strategies that are currently employed in different states.

              Leaving aside for a moment the report’s content, there is one other significant reason why this is such an important and valuable report.  Because for the first time we have an approach to gun violence which brings together all the major GVP stakeholders: law enforcement, legal, prosecutorial, public health, non-profit, GVP advocacy – I hope I’m not leaving anyone out.  It’s a very impressive list.

To quote the report: “Guns and domestic violence are a lethal combination.” The report cites the fact that there is a five-fold increase in deaths when either person (usually a man) in a domestic dispute has access to a gun.  If the report had given all the scholarly citations which exist to support this statement, we could spend lots of time scrolling down to get to the rest of the text.  NRA nonsense to the contrary (see below), what happens when a gun is part of an argument between domestic partners is an indisputable fact.

Guns can be taken away from persons engaged in domestic disputes either through a Court action or by law enforcement called to the scene of the dispute itself.  The fact that 32 states do not have any statutes authorizing on-scene seizures of weapons is, to my mind, a remarkable failure of government to fulfill its ‘compelling interest’ to keep communities safe. Because no matter how strong or effective a Court-ordered removal/retrieval action happens to be, there will always be some gap in time between when the dispute occurs and when a gun has to be given up.    The report notes that half the women killed by intimate partners had contact with the criminal justice system related to the dispute within one year prior to their deaths.  But when the cops show up at the front door because someone calls them and says that there’s a big fight going on in the apartment down the hall, does this type of incident, which happens all the time, count as ‘contact’ with criminal justice?  I have my doubts.

The part of the report that I find most disconcerting are the maps which show what types of removal strategies are sanctioned by state laws. Typical of state gun laws, it’s a hodge-podge of statutes, with a few states requiring gun removal after the issuance of an order, other states granting implicit removal authority, but many states making no mention of gun removals at all.  In this third group, for example, we find Texas, Missouri, Louisiana and Georgia, which just happen to be four states whose overall gun violence rates far exceed the national average.  Any chance there’s a connection?

The NRA will tell you there’s no connection at all.  In fact, in their obsessive attempts to find new markets, Gun Nation has been trying to convince women, in particular, to defend themselves with guns.  The latest screed in this respect comes from that idiotic loudmouth Dana Loesch, who has just put out another video claiming that gun control is the ‘real war against women’ because only a gun can equalize the physical differences between women and men.

I want to end with a slight editorial which in no way detracts from the value and importance of this report. I have always believed that the term ‘domestic violence’ is perhaps too narrow to really capture and understand what gun violence is all about.  Perhaps 80% of all gun homicides and assaults involve persons who knew each other and most of the perpetrators had histories of violence before the attack occurred.  Don’t we need to find some way to take the guns away from them?

 

 

By Protecting The 2nd Amendment, Scalia Also Protected Gun Violence.

The body’s still cold, Scalia’s body that is, but Gun Nation and its sycophantic noisemakers aren’t wasting any time getting the word out that the 2nd Amendment will be the first thing harmed if Obama actually gets the chance to put a new face on the Supreme Court.  Now much of this is just stupid posturing because if anyone actually believes that a sitting President can be denied his lawful opportunity (indeed his responsibility) to nominate a justice to SCOTUS, well, there are crazier things being said in this year’s political campaign, but not that many when all is said and done.

The crazy sweepstakes already have a possible winner in Ted Cruz, who immediately shot off a tweet that Scalia’s death means that “we are one Justice away from a Supreme Court that would harm our Second Amendment rights.”  And while the NRA hasn’t yet figured out how to use Scalia’s death to promote their fundraising agenda, you can get a preview of where they will be going with the tweet they posted thanking Scalia for his “unwavering” defense of the Constitution, which means protecting 2nd-Amendment rights.

               All of which made me start thinking about how and why the NRA really promotes the utility of the 2nd Amendment, i.e., why is it so important that Americans have access to guns? Because in case you haven’t noticed, a majority of Americans don’t own guns, and the number of gun-owning folks, relatively speaking, keeps going down.  Which means that maybe, just maybe, the Supreme Court really is just one vote away from rolling back all those pro-gun decisions.  Which made me start thinking: What would be the result if, in fact, free access to guns currently guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment came to an end?

What I think it comes down to is the unwavering belief on the part of Gun Nation that owning a gun is a basic protection against danger and crime.  The idea that owning guns makes us ‘free’ is all well and good, but it’s really too abstract a concept to be applied in everyday affairs, and nobody really believes that all those half-baked militia idiots arrested at Malheur Refuge could protect themselves or anyone else from the slightest degree of armed threat. So it gets down to the notion that having a gun is a simple and tangible way to express the natural desire to be safe.  And as John Lott is quick to remind us, there must be some truth to this idea because otherwise how do you explain the fact that more than 12 million Americans have now taken the trouble to secure the legal right to walk around with a gun?

Which brings me to a bit of research that I did earlier today on the CDC website which gives very detailed data on the five categories that comprise every different way in which a gun can cause an injury – unintentional death, unintentional injury, homicide, suicide and aggravated assault.  And it turns out that in the period since 2001, during which time the size of the civilian arsenal and the number of people with concealed-carry licenses probably doubled, the number of people killed or injured by guns has also increased by 27 percent!  In 2001 the total number of gun injury victims was 109,223.  Of this number, homicides were 26%, suicides were 15% and assaults were 42%.  In 2013, the total for gun violence was 138,787, of which homicides were 24%, suicides were 15% and assaults were 48%.  This remarkable increase in gun violence was not because a particular category went up; it was because every significant category of gun violence increased.

The next time you find yourself in a discussion with someone who tells you that Scalia’s death could jeopardize the 2nd-Amendment, you might refer to the numbers above and point out how they have changed in the recent years. Which as far as I am concerned is the real legacy of Scalia’s stalwart defense of Constitutional rights.

John Lott Has A New Gun Survey Which Doesn’t Say What He Would Like It To Say.

Not to ever be considered anything less than a full-fledged member of the academic community, John Lott has just published the results of two surveys he conducted on the views of academic scholars about guns, in particular whether gun ownership makes us more or less safe.  Lott has been hammering away at this issue for more than twenty years, and although his research has been debunked again and again for either being wrong or possibly non-existent, to his credit John slogs on and on.

John’s latest attempt to burnish his academic bone-fides are these surveys, which can either be downloaded in full from SSRN or read in a summary written by John himself.  The bottom line is that his surveys of 74 academics who “published peer-reviewed empirical research on gun issues in criminology and economics journals” shows, not surprisingly, that a slim majority of respondents tended to support Lott’s long-held view that armed citizens decrease the murder rate, and roughly half the respondents did not believe that suicide rates were at all affected by having a gun in the home.

Although Lott doesn’t mention his competition by name, the gold standard for surveys on what academic researchers think about guns belongs to David Hemenway and his Injury Control Research Center at Harvard’s School of Public Health, a group that has conducted 13 separate surveys of published academics, including surveys on both the questions which Lott covered in the study he just released.

Survey question by the Harvard group: “In the United States, having a gun in the home increases the risk of suicide.” Answers: 150.  Result: 84% agreed or strongly agreed.

Survey question by the Harvard group: “Carrying a gun on your person outside the home generally reduces the risk of being killed.”  Answers: 113.  Result: 76% disagreed or strongly disagreed.

How is it that two groups of academic scholars could give such different responses to the same questions about guns?  And it should be added that both Lott and Hemenway basically created their survey groups by following the same criteria: published, peer-reviewed studies which excluded book reviews and other, non-academic work.

But if there was any basic difference between the academic backgrounds of the two survey groups, it lies in the fact that Lott and Hemenway chose very different academic disciplines from whom to build their survey lists.  Lott sent surveys to criminologists and economists, who happen to represent the academic fields in which he has published his own work; Hemenway’s surveys went out to individuals who had published relevant articles in peer-reviewed journals devoted to public health, public policy, sociology or criminology.

Given the overlap in disciplines, I think it is not an invalid approach to combine these surveys and see what we get.  On the question of whether guns in the home lead to an increase in suicide, a total of both surveys resulted in 67% saying ‘yes.’  On the question of armed citizens bringing down the murder rate, the two surveys only registered about half saying ‘yes.’

I don’t think these two surveys are any kind of ringing endorsement for the idea that academics, according to John Lott, are all that comfortable with his views on guns.  And even among the two groups of scholars queried by Lott – criminologists and economists – the latter group was much more in line with his thinking than what he got in responses from academics whose major field involves the study of crime. The fact is that Lott could only find a majority of his survey respondents who buy his Koolaid brand by including economists who publish little, if any research directly relevant to guns or crime.

In an interview with The Blaze, John Lott stated that “when The New York Times interviews an academic for a gun-related story, they can’t seem to find one who says that guns make people safer.”  But after carefully reviewing his surveys, I have to admit that I might find it difficult to find such scholars myself.  And unlike John, I haven’t been throwing around this armed citizen nonsense for the last twenty years.

Everytown And Cosmopolitan Get Together And Get It Right!

What I find to be the most significant change in the gun debate recently is the extent to which the whole issue has become a topic of mainstream conversation. It started with the decision by Hillary to inject gun violence into her Presidential campaign, the very first time that guns became a talking-point in a national political contest, and it has now spread to the mainstream media through such venues as Marie-Claire and now Cosmopolitan magazine.  And what the Cosmo gals have done is partner with Everytown to produce a new project, SingledOut, which gets right to the issue of how and why women think about guns.

                Before I get to the Cosmo-Everytown effort, I just want to remind the readers again that Gun Nation has been making a loud and concerted effort recently to promote the idea of women and guns.  There’s no end to NRA videos that now feature women commentators like Home-School Queen Dana Loesch; you can also read an entire report and graphic on the emerging female gun market courtesy of the NSSF.  But a recent survey of 5,000 gun owners, the most comprehensive survey ever published in this field, reveals that 5% of the women who own guns bought one in the past five years!  So much for the idea that women are joining Gun Nation in droves.

The video produced by SingledOut is, to my mind, the best video on the gun debate ever produced.  And it gets right to the point at the beginning when the gunsplaining guy tells the woman he’s hitting on that guns are what protects us from ‘tyranny,’ while he proudly shows her that he’s packing a chest-full of guns.  And the woman, who is active military, responds by telling him that his comment means that soldiers like her might come and take them all away. Beautiful, just beautiful.

Of course Gun Nation wasted no time responding to this new effort, putting out the usual ‘Bloomberg is Enemy Number One’ comment which then found its way to the mélange of pro-gun sites that faithfully reproduce anything that the boys in Fairfax have to say.  But I notice that in all the responses to SingledOut by Gun Nation, the one issue that is studiously avoided is exactly what Gun Nation has been promoting as the most important reason for owning a gun, namely, that guns keep us free.  And if the producers of the SingledOut video wanted to find one, single statement that could be used to illustrate the stupid, condescension of pro-gun noisemakers when it comes to talking about guns, they couldn’t have picked a better comment than what the ‘good guy’ said in the bar to explain what guns mean to him.

Now let’s be honest.  It’s 2016, a Presidential election is looming ahead, and the NRA makes no bones about the fact, 501c3 status notwithstanding, that the organization wants to have an important voice in determining the outcome of state and national electoral events.  And since the Republicans can’t get any more mileage by claiming that Obama wasn’t born in America (which, by the way, may be used by Trump against Cruz), they’ve come up with a new one, namely, that Obama has been shredding the Constitution and thus undermining American freedoms; in other words, under the Democrats, ‘tyranny’ is just one step away.

Let’s get one thing very clear: Republican presidential candidates can defend the 2nd Amendment all they want in front of red-meat audiences on the campaign trail, but asking a majority of Americans to support their pandering to Gun Nation is a very different kettle of fish. And while every word that plops out of Wayne-o’s mouth ends up as unquestioned content on various Gun Nation websites, you can’t tell me that any of those outlets get a fraction of the mainstream audience that Cosmopolitan reaches every month.

 

 

Scalia’s Pro-Gun Views Didn’t Hurt The GVP Community At All.

Back in 2006 I happened to be a guest at a law school dinner, and before the dinner Antonin Scalia gave a talk. He later told me that it was ‘the same talk I give a hundred times a year,’ and then we all sat down for a meal.  At some point someone told him I was a gun dealer, and he jumped up, grabbed his plate of food, came running over to my table, pushed the guy next to me out of the way and sat down. For the next hour he talked animatedly about different guns, different calibers, was particularly interested in my thoughts about the differences between a 338 Winchester Magnum and a 300 Weatherby; I told him it didn’t matter since if he was more than 150 yards away he wouldn’t hit the mulie anyway. We went on and on.

It hardly came as a surprise that he authored the Heller opinion in 2008 because he was not only a certifiable gun nut, but was probably the only member of the Court who knew anything about guns.  In fact, if you read Steve Breyer’s dissent in Heller, you’ll discover that Breyer evidently doesn’t know a rifle from a musket, which when it comes to how much any of the other SCOTUS justices knows about guns, is probably about par for the course.

In the aftermath of the Heller and MacDonald decisions, Gun Nation has been diligently trying to get more gun cases before a right-leaning Court, and the possibility that Obama might appoint a liberal to the bench will no doubt be used by the NRA as the theme of their weekly pitch for dough.  The fact is (I really enjoy using the word ‘fact’ when I write about guns) that the SCOTUS has heard exactly one 2nd-Amendment case since 2008, a case in which the Court, in a majority opinion written by Justice Kagan, effectively upheld the entire ATF regulatory system as not infringing on 2nd-Amendment rights.  And just this past December, the Court declined to hear a case, Friedman v. City of Highland Park, in which a man sued because the town in which he lives won’t let him own an AR-15, a.k.a. an assault rifle, a.k.a. what we call a ‘black’ gun.

Just as I wasn’t surprised that Scalia wrote the Heller opinion, so I wasn’t surprised that he based the opinion not on history, not on precedent, but on simple common sense. Because when it came to guns, what Scalia knew and what other SCOTUS justices probably didn’t know, was that in the fifty years since the Court had previously handed down a 2-Amendment ruling (U.S. v. Miller), the United States had gone from a country in which most firearms were long guns owned for hunting to handguns owned for personal defense.  So when Scalia stated in Heller that keeping a loaded, unlocked handgun in the home had become an American ‘tradition,’ maybe the tradition was only thirty years old, but it had become standard lexicon for defining gun ownership nonetheless.

If you think that the Heller decision has unleashed a spate of 2nd-Amendment legal tests in the lower courts, just imagine what would have happened if Scalia and the SCOTUS had followed Miller and other precedents and declared that the 2nd Amendment didn’t protect private gun ownership at all.  Such a decision would have unleashed a torrent of gun laws at the local and state levels reflecting the second big change that has occurred and has now also become an American tradition when we talk about guns.

What I am referring to is what I call the GVP tradition, which has become, for the first time in my long lifetime, a grass-roots, broad-based effort to bring some sanity to America’s love affair with guns. The GVP movement is stronger and more sustained than anyone could have imagined just a few years ago, and it will continue to develop momentum regardless of who sits on the High Court.

 

 

 

Ted Nugent Explains Jews And Gun Control To The World.

For a whole bunch of reasons, some personal, some having to do with my regard for his musicianship, I have refrained until now joining my GVP friends in condemning NRA Board Member Ted Nugent’s gun rants.  I figured that it’s not as if he says anything that really deserves to be discussed, frankly, I usually feel that he should simply be ignored.  But this time he’s crossed a line which, given the fact that I’m Jewish-American by origin although certainly far away from being of practicing belief, requires me to respond.  And I’m referring of course to his Facebook posting containing pictures of 12 Jewish politicians, GVP influencers and other activists who he labels as ‘punks’ because “they would deny us the basic human right to self defense & to KEEP AND BEAR ARMS.”  And just to make sure that nobody missed the point, Ted followed this up several hours later with another post consisting of a photo of Jews being herded forward by a Nazi soldier, the caption reading: “Soulless sheep to the slaughter. Not me.”

              Now before I go forward, let me make one thing very clear.  Nobody’s ever accused Nugent of being a rocket scientist and you don’t have to score very high on an IQ test to strum a guitar.  The fact that what he says is often dumb, dumber and dumbest has proven to be a clever way to keep his name in lights considering that he hasn’t released a hit record in more than twenty years. And frankly, many of the comments he makes about minorities and liberals aren’t that much different in tone and results from what his good buddy Donald Trump says every time he wants a boost in his polls.

But what drew me to Ted’s post was the fact that the only way a viewer would know that all of the individuals pictured were Jewish was because each face was adorned by an Israeli flag.  Now Ted might actually believe that this flag is some kind of universal Jewish symbol or logo but it’s not.  The flag design has only been in existence since 1897 when it was flown at a Zionist conference in Basel, and was then adopted as the official State of Israel flag in 1948.

So what is Ted really telling us by placing this flag on the faces of Mike Bloomberg, Dianne Feinstein, Alan Dershowitz, et. al?  Is he also saying something about the link between these American Jews and Israel?  Because if so, without intending it I’m sure, he has raised a very interesting issue as regards American liberalism, gun control and support for Israel that deserves to be understood.  The fact is that the same ‘anti-gun’ Senators pictured in Nugent’s Facebook rant (Blumenthal, Boxer, Feinstein, Lautenberg, Levin) have all supported domestic regulation of guns, but they have also been legislative leaders in insuring that Israel receives more than $3 billion in military aid each year, which now totals more than $70 billion since the monies started flowing in 1949.  In fact, no other country in the world has received this much military assistance from the Pentagon, and for all the hue and cry over Iran’s alleged attempt to build a nuclear arsenal, the next time you visit Israel, don’t try to book a tour of Dimona, which happens to be where Israel builds its nuclear bombs.

Why are folks like Feinstein and Boxer so supportive of arming the Israel Defense Forces and, at the same time, just as willing to support gun-control legislation at home?  Because the truth is that Israel really does need arms to protect itself from its enemies, but Americans who follow Nugent’s advice to arm themselves aren’t protecting the rest of us from anyone at all. And the good news is that a majority of Americans support Israel and a majority of Americans also support sensible gun controls.  Which are both ideas much too obvious for an idiot like Ted to understand.

Does The NICS System Work? It Not Only Works, It’s Getting Better.

One of the enduring myths of the gun debate is the notion that the FBI-NICS background check system is broken and probably beyond repair. Or to put it in the usual Gun Nation vernacular, we don’t any more gun-control laws because the laws we have now don’t work.  And then what happens is that someone who passes a NICS check does something stupid with a gun, like the Umpqua shooter or the man and wife in San Bernardino, and see, we told you so, the system really doesn’t work. Which then becomes the rationale for preventing background checks on all gun transfers because since the system doesn’t work, why ask it to do more?

              Actually, I think the system not only works very well but, as I am going to show below, many states are constantly trying to upgrade it so that it will work better.  The reason I think the system works is because the low denial rate (at or below 1%) tells me that most legal gun commerce is exactly that – people buying guns who are legally allowed to own guns.  The fact that ‘bad guys’ find other ways to get their hands on guns has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not NICS is working the way it was designed to work.

Despite rumor-mongering and plain stupidity to the contrary, the Brady system was not established as a crime-fighting measure; it was initially designed to delay the purchase of handguns for five days.  Would this procedure have kept guns out of the hands of criminals?  Maybe yes, maybe no.  But that was not the law’s intent.  The intent of the law, which was revised when an instant background check was substituted for the five-day waiting period to allow for a manual background check, was to prevent the impulsive purchase of handguns by anyone who wanted to use a gun to violently attack themselves or someone else.   When the National Research Council concluded their review of research on whether the NICS system had been an effective instrument in reducing crime, they didn’t say that NICS had been ineffective, they said that more research was needed in order to determine Brady’s true effects.  You can thank the Republicans who cut CDC gun-research funding for this gap.

When the Brady bill became law, every state was given two choices in order to comply with the requirement that every first-time gun sale first be approved with an instant background check.  The check could be run by the FBI-NICS operation located in West Virginia, or it could be run by the state itself, this latter system being known as a Point of Contact system, or POC.  Everyone uses the same three databases, which are compiled nationally but obviously require data from every state.  And here is the problem which creates headaches for NICS administrators and excuses for the gang which doesn’t want any controls over guns, namely, that in our federal system, every state has a different way of keeping track of crime, every state uses different software for their systems, every state has gobs of legacy data that is often not even online, every state developed its own criminal-data system without the slightest interest or concern about how crime data was being created, used or stored in any other state.

Now if you listen to Mike Huckabee and the other Republican clowns, you might think that the NICS system is so badly broken that there’s no sense in trying to fix it at all. In fact, over the last seven years, 26 states have spent more than $95 million improving their NICS data, the biggest chunk of dough going to New York, with second-place Florida not far behind.  Much of this money has gone for improving interfaces between criminal and mental health reporting, tracking involuntary commitments, updating county systems and training staff.  And when was the law passed which authorizes this funding?  Under a pro-gun President named George W. Bush.

 

How Violent Is Gun Violence? More Than You Think.

One of the continuing debates within the GVP community is how to define ‘gun violence.’  On the one hand there are the obvious categories: homicide, assault and robbery with a gun.  Then there is suicide with a gun, which results in death but is certainly a different sort of violence than what happens when a gun is used in a criminal act. And of course we also differentiate between intentional, as opposed to unintentional acts of gun violence; indeed, the latter may not actually be gun violence, even though someone still ends up being injured by a gun.

              Incidentally, outside the GVP, gun violence doesn’t exist.  As far as I know, the NRA and the NSSF have never used the term ‘gun violence’ in anything they have ever said about guns. The various pro-gun noisemakers (Emily Miller, Dana Loesch, every Republican Presidential candidate, et. al.) prattle on about violent ‘thugs’ who use guns, but it’s people who kill people, remember?  It’s got nothing to do with the gun.  Now back to reality.

Adding up all the categories above, the national gun violence toll in 2013 was 117,894.  At least this is the number published by the CDC. By the agency’s own admission, this number is understated.  Why?  Because when we count nonfatal injuries, any kind of injury, we are estimating the actual number based on reporting from a ‘representative’ group of emergency medical facilities, and sometimes the estimations are close to reality and sometimes they are not. So the death toll is close to accurate but the injury numbers may or may not be exact.  And this is a serious gap in what we know about gun violence because gun injuries are more likely to be significantly more serious than any other type of injury, unless you fall out of a fifth-story window and somehow manage to survive.

My friends at the Gun Violence Archive, by the way, have gun morality numbers which match up pretty close to the CDC.  In 2014 the CDC found 12,265 gun deaths from every type of shooting except suicides.  The GVA number for 2014 was 12,585.  Obviously, the GVA calculation for non-fatal gun injuries is far below the number recorded by the CDC, because most shootings that don’t result in a death aren’t newsworthy enough to get media mention, which is the basic source of information used by the GVA.

Which brings me to the point of this commentary, namely, the fact that by focusing on gun deaths, as opposed to overall injuries, the main issue of gun violence is obscured, if not altogether lost.  The gun violence issue is driven by homicides, particularly when a mass shooting occurs.  But in terms of how many people are seriously affected by shootings, gun mortality is the tip of the iceberg, and we need to understand the totality of the problem if we are going to map mitigating strategies that will really work.

There’s a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Bedford-Stuyvesant, a.k.a., ‘Bed-Stuy, Do or Die.’ Like many Brooklyn neighborhoods, it’s beginning to experience a degree of gentrification, but the area around Fulton and Atlantic Avenues is still the Wild West.  So far this year the neighborhood has experienced 2 murders, which if the carnage continues, the yearly homicide rate per 100,000 will top 20.  But the total number of shooting victims is now 6, which will yield an annual gun violence rate of 60; further down Atlantic Avenue in East New York the GV rate could top 140 by end of year.

Numbers like this don’t describe an ‘epidemic’ of gun violence.  Frankly, I don’t know whether we have invented terminology which accurately describes this state of affairs. But there are neighborhoods all over the United States which experience gun violence at levels equal or above to what goes on in Bed-Stuy; higher even than the violence experienced in Honduras or the Ivory Coast. I’m not even sure that a word like ‘violence’ describes what is really going on.

 

 

 

 

Does Knowledge About Guns Laws Promote More Gun Laws? Maybe Yes, Maybe No.

A new study conducted by researchers at Yale University and covered in The Trace appears to confirm a truism in how people develop and hold opinions, namely, the more you want to believe in something, the more you can make yourself believe in something.  In this case, the issue is guns, and what two Yale researchers discovered in a survey of 1,384 people, is that people who support stronger gun-control laws also know that background checks are not conducted on all gun transfers, whereas people who are less inclined to support less gun-control laws believe that universal background checks are already in place. In other words, if you believe there is a gun “problem” and you further believe that new laws could help solve the problem, you will be in favor of more laws.  And to quote an old Spanish saying: If not, not.

              I have two issues with this survey, but I want it understood that I am not trying to throw out the baby with the bathwater; I’m just trying to make the bathwater a bit more warm.  To begin, I am always somewhat suspect of public surveys about guns if the survey purports to reflect the views of a ‘representative’ group of Americans without distinguishing whether this particular group includes gun owners or not. Because on any issue related to guns, these folks are going to have plenty to say, particularly if they happen to be among the minority if gun owners who really do ‘cling’ to their guns because it’s a lifestyle and a hobby that is very important to them.  They are not necessarily the majority of gun owners and it certainly isn’t a majority of Americans, but it may be a majority in certain gun-rich states and it’s for sure just about everyone who turns out when a new gun law comes up for debate.

In this respect the Yale researchers ask the following question: “Could it be that public misperceptions of existing gun control laws also contribute to the absence of public mobilization for new legislation?”  Let me break it gently to our GVP colleagues from Yale – the folks who are against new gun laws never have any trouble mobilizing for a public debate, whether they know anything about the law in question or not.  It’s the 89% of respondents to this survey who both know there are no universal background checks and want an expansion of gun-control laws who usually don’t show up.

The authors focused this survey on questions about background checks because, according to them, “universal background checks for gun purchases could substantially reduce the number of gun-related deaths in the USA.”  They cite two well-known studies to bolster this statement, but that’s not what either study actually says.  The research by Eric Fleelger and his group correlates gun fatalities with the presence or absence of gun laws in every state, but background checks are just one of 17 different legal procedures that are used to monitor public traffic of guns.  As for the study by Daniel Webster, et. al., on the effect of the repeal of Missouri’s handgun-purchase law, a permit-to-purchase procedure conducted at the state level is, by definition, a much more rigorous method for weeding out unqualified handgun purchasers than a 60-second conversation between a gun shop owner and an FBI staffer at NICS.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am not saying or implying that the problem of gun violence can be effectively addressed without additional laws.  I am also not saying that researching the effect of gun-control laws with an eye towards making those laws more effective shouldn’t be done.  But what I am saying is that if we believe in public policy as a mechanism for change, then the question we really have to ask is not whether folks understand the ins and outs of specific policies, but whether they are willing to come out and show themselves when a public policy is being addressed.  Perhaps that’s the question which should have been asked.