Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 97

Want A New AR Rifle? Don’t Buy A New Gun, Just Buy A New Part.

One of highlights of the gun business is going to the SHOT Show each year and looking at new products.  The gun industry is awash each year in new products for the simple reason that gun makers have to find ways to sell more guns to the same consumers, even if these same consumers already own more guns than they really need to own.  Actually, the last time the gun industry changed the basic design of any product was when Gaston Glock substituted a striker for a hammer and stuck it inside a polymer frame. Otherwise, all the various doo-dads that you find on guns may change the look, the finish or the feel, but a gun is still a gun.

              This may not be the case with a new product from an AR custom shop out of Nevada, Franklin Armory, that specializes cobbling together various components to create various different styles of black guns.  And while a gun is a gun is a gun, this time around the folks at Franklin Armory appear to have come up with not just a new type of AR rifle, but a new technology design which differs very significantly from the traditional way in which assault rifles actually work.

It’s called a binary-trigger system, which means that you don’t just get off a shot every time you pull the trigger, you also get off a shot by letting the trigger snap back to its standard firing position rather than waiting for the trigger to snap back to the firing position while the bolt slams shut and then pulling it again. In other words, because the firing mechanism is activated by the trigger moving in either direction, you are getting 2 shots even though you are only pulling the trigger once.

The company has sent relevant engineering and design documentation to the ATF, and while they haven’t gotten an official ‘yes’ as regards this new design, they also haven’t received a ‘no.’  The ATF test lab is the last word on whether any gun can be sold in the United States, which means that right now there’s a teeny chance that all guns sold with this firing system will have to be recalled, but I wouldn’t bet the barn that this would happen anytime soon.

You can catch a discussion about this new firing technology on a video posted on the Guns America website following SHOT.  You can also see the BFS system in actual use by going to the recoil.com website linked above. In the interests of full disclosure, I have not personally tested the Binary Firing System myself.  But if it performs the way it appears in the videos I have watched, there may be a real change in assault-rifle technology looming ahead.

The AR-style platform is popular because of its modular design, which means you can pull out just about any part of the gun and replace it with another, similar part of your own choice.  It’s the ability of gun owners, particularly younger owners, to customize virtually every piece of the AR which makes the gun so popular because you don’t have to buy a new gun to get a new product, all you have to do is buy a new part.  And if or when Franklin Armory gets the official go-ahead from the ATF, I’ll guarantee they will start selling this BFS module to any AR owner who wants to use it with their own gun.

Now here’s the problem for my friends in GVP.  Because of the way the binary trigger works, a gun with this system delivers shots faster than the standard AR. It’s not a full-auto gun, but you are basically shooting semi-auto mode twice as quickly as when the trigger has to be pulled for every shot.  If I need to spell out the implications of this technology to anyone who is concerned about the lethality of an AR, I suggest you go back and read this column again.

 

Want To Live Where You Don’t Need Training To Walk Around With A Gun? Live Just About Anywhere.

Anybody who thinks The Trace isn’t a source for serious journalism about gun violence ought to think again. Last week Mike Spies authored a story about the conflict between hunters and ranchers in places like the Malheur Reserve, and went far beyond any of the cliché-ridden nonsense that spewed forth from the media before and after the Bundy Boys tried to protect their Constitutional rights.  This week we have another important contribution to GVP journalism with Jennifer Mascia’s report on training required for concealed-carry permits, although her research clearly demonstrates that in most cases this so-called training amounts to no training at all.

              You may recall that before he was found groping between stalls in a public toilet, Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) had introduced the first national, concealed-carry bill. The bill went nowhere, but it has of late been gaining steam, and last year fell just a few short of getting a positive Senate vote.  It goes without saying, of course, that the entire clown act running for the Republican Presidential nomination would sign such a bill into law.

What Mascia’s article points out is that even without formal, national reciprocity, Gun Nation has managed to create a state-by-state reciprocal infrastructure which allows CCW-holders to carry concealed weapons in a majority of states and, in many cases, to do so without being required to experience any live-fire instruction or proficiency-testing whatsoever.  And why does an organization allegedly devoted to training and gun safety like the NRA promote such dangerous behavior?  Because, as one trainer told Mascia, “I agree with it from the safety perspective, but disagree with it constitutionally.”  In other words, according to this constitutional expert-turned-gun-trainer, the 2nd Amendment grants Americans the unfettered right to own and use a gun, and nobody can be prevented from exercising this ‘right’ just because in the process of doing so they might prove to be dangerous to themselves or someone else.

Now let’s not waste anyone’s time by reminding the ‘I can do whatever I want with my gun’ crowd that, in fact, the majority opinion in District of Columbia vs. Heller explicitly gives public agencies authority to regulate the use of guns.  And let’s also not waste anyone’s time by reminding the same crowd that the courts have said again and again that “preventing danger to the community is a legitimate regulatory goal.” Because the truth is that Gun Nation believes that walking around with a gun is, in fact, a way of preventing community danger, and they cling to this belief even if it means that people are out there protecting the rest of us by carrying guns that they haven’t shot at all.

Or maybe they shot the gun a whole, big 25 rounds which is what the Nevada CCW requirement entails. Does anyone in their right mind actually believe that standing in front of an unmoving paper target and taking as much time as needed to hit a humanoid outline 4 out of 5 times prepares someone to safely deliver lethal force with a gun?

Never mind shooting the gun.  How about just holding it?  Take a look at the picture of the concealed-carry class in Utah which adorns the top of Mascia’s text.  Notice the kid is sitting in a crowded classroom with his finger on the trigger of his gun. Of course he knew the gun was empty, of course he knew. He checked, right?

Anyone who thinks I applaud this journalism because The Trace is anti-gun can go lay brick.  If Gun Nation had one, single media venue whose concern for accuracy and evidence-based reportage was even a fraction of what is practiced in The Trace, we might actually engage both sides in a serious and substantive discussion which might yield some fruit. But as long as pro-gun organizations continue to deflect concerns about gun violence through some half-baked reference to their 2nd-Amendment rights, we might as well ignore the 30,000+ gun deaths each year because nothing’s going to change.

 

Why Can’t We Use The Militia To Defend Ourselves?

Now that the Bundy Militia has decided that eating dinner at home is better than freezing in the administration building on the Malheur Preserve, I decided to spend a bit of time reading about the whole notion of militias, if only because the bunch at Malheur seem convinced that they represent some kind of unquestioned Constitutional mandate to protect liberty and justice forever.

               Actually, if the modern-day Boy Scouts who go out on weekends and play soldier boy in some gravel pit with their AR rifles would take the trouble to read the Constitution, they might actually discover that as members of a militia they are first and foremost required to follow the dictates of their most hated enemy, a.k.a., Barack Obama, who happens to be Commander in Chief.  I quote from Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 which says: “The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States.”

But why let facts or legal texts stand in the way of shooting your mouth off on Fox News?  And it stands to reason that the group at Malheur would call themselves a militia since the modern militia movement has descended directly from anti-government ‘patriot’ groups which, if traced back to their origins, bear a certain clear resemblance to racialist groups which go all the way back to the Ku Klux Klan.  How could it be otherwise when Ammon Bundy’s father Cliven was about to be lionized by Sean Hannity until he screwed up the whole thing by saying, “Let me tell you about your Negro,” followed by a few other choice words.

In this respect, I just read an interesting Letter to the Editor of the Kansas City Star. The author pointed out that the Kansas State Constitution requires the Legislature to organize and equip the state’s militia, and he was wondering (obviously tongue-in-cheek) whether this meant that the Legislature had to supply these self-styled militias with guns.  It’s an interesting concept when you think about it, because currently 23 states have organized militias, usually referred to as State Defense Forces, which can be pressed into service if the National Guard units have been deployed somewhere else. And although such units are sanctioned by Title 32 of the U.S. Code, they are wholly volunteer outfits serving solely at the discretion and direction of state officials, normally the Governor and the Adjutant General who also commands the National Guard.

Not surprisingly, these modern-day militias tend to be called out in response to natural disasters, more than 2,000 SDF personnel participated in rescue and cleanup efforts after Hurricane Katrina, to cite one very important case. On the other hand, SDF units do not receive any regular training nor do the Feds provide any dough for weapons or other equipment and supplies.  Know what happens when a state government has to bear the entire cost of any program?  There usually isn’t a program.

Maybe the Bundy boys and their militia buddies aren’t really so off the mark when they claim to be standing up for their Constitutional rights against the abusive power of the Feds.  After all, wasn’t it Rick Perry who, as Governor of Texas, raised the possibility that Texas might secede?  Which means he would need some kind of armed force to make good on his threat, which means maybe he would use the state militia, which means that the Bundy brothers and their gang could drive down to Texas, volunteer for militia service and finally get a chance to use all those AR rifles to defend their God-given rights.

If you are thinking that I’m just having a little fun because Donald Trump lost the Iowa primary you’re right.  But let’s remember that it was Marco Rubio who took a day off from campaigning to buy a gun as a response to the looming ISIS threat. You think the boys at Malheur are the only crazy ones around?

 

Grover Norquist Might Like To Think That Women Are Into Guns But That’s Not The Case At All.

As a dedicated GVP advocate, it’s hardly a challenge to take on an intellectual middleweight like John Lott or respond to the dopey antics of Colion Noir or Dana Loesch.  But when someone like Grover Norquist decides to get into the gun debate, responding gets you in the deep water, because Norquist is nobody’s fool and he’s respected by both sides among the groups whose views really count.

Norquist’s venture into the gun issue can be found in an open forum blog whose contributions are surprisingly eclectic and politically diverse.  And if Grover is writing about guns at the behest of the NRA, on whose Board of Directors he sits, then he’s chosen a forum that would be hard-pressed to produce another NRA member besides him.  Actually, medium.com now has at least two members because I just joined.

               The point of Norquist’s column is to argue that Hillary is probably making a big mistake by coming out against guns.  And the reason she is going down the wrong road is because political ‘swing’ states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin have shown significant increases in the recent issuance of concealed-carry permits, in particular CCW issued to women.  Norquist states that more than 1.5 million concealed-carry permits have gone out over the last twelve months, the “majority” to female applicants. To quote Grover: “The demographics of the gun issue have shifted significantly under Hillary’s feet in the past 20 years.”

They have?  Well I guess it’s probably true if you want to believe the marketing bromides of the gun industry.  But there is not a single, reliable source that can be used to confirm such claims, and pardon me if I don’t accept the unsubstantiated claims made by the NSSF or the NRA.  If anything, women always poll more strongly than men when asked if they favor gun control over gun rights, and minority groups remain, for the most part, overwhelmingly resistant to guns.

Hillary’s plunge into the middle of the gun debate, pace Grover Norquist, is a very smart move. For one thing, it covers a very important flank vis-à-vis Bernie, whose voting record on gun issues, to be polite, is somewhat mixed.  It also helps increase her stature with millennials, who appear to be anti-gun.  Ditto with new immigrants and particularly ditto with minorities whose voting numbers for Obama better be duplicated by whichever Democrat sits atop the ticket later this year.  Republicans face a real battle garnering a majority of any of those groups, and while Grover might want to believe that, as he puts it, “voters today carry their guns in their purses, not their pickup trucks,” he better hope that most of those purses are being carried by older, white men, because that’s still the gun-owning demographic bar none.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not a political analyst and I certainly wouldn’t for one minute pretend that I possess one iota of Grover’s political experience or smarts.  But I have taught the safety course that my state requires for CCW to more than 5,000 men and women over the last ten years, and when I first started teaching the course, almost all the students were men.  Now I would say, on average, that women count for one out of three bodies that fill the seats.  So there has been a change in the gender composition of the folks who apply for CCW in my state.  But the change in numbers doesn’t explain the story at all.

Overwhelmingly, the women who apply for CCW are doing it because a husband or boyfriend brings them along. The real change that has occurred is a change in how couples now share activities rather than go their separate ways.  And not only do they share activities but increasingly women make the decisions for how household money will be spent.  Which means that the guy who wants to buy a gun asks her for the dough. But he’s still buying the gun.

Do Doctors Know What To Say To Patients About Guns? Not If You Believe That Guns Aren’t A Health Risk.

Since the health care industry now racks up revenues in excess of $1.6 trillion each year, there are plenty of online publications and other venues which are used to promote (i.e., advertise) the services and products driving this economic juggernaut.  And one such venture, an online publication called MD Magazine, caught my eye because it published a survey of subscriber attitudes towards guns and counseling patients about guns – a hot-button topic in the medical profession ever since Florida passed a gag order prohibiting doctors to talk to patients about guns.

              While the Florida law didn’t absolutely prohibit doctor-patient gun discussions, it just relegated such discussions to situations in which the physician had reason to believe that the health of the patient was at imminent risk.  Of course since we are talking about behavior, it’s virtually impossible for a physician, or anyone else for that matter, to accurately predict imminent risk, which is precisely why doctors need the widest possible latitude in patient contacts, which is why doctor-patient relationships are circumscribed in every respect by the tightest degree of confidentiality, which is why the attempt to push the medical profession out of the discussion about guns is nothing more than pandering to the lowest, common intellectual denominator.  But what the hell, if you can build an entire Presidential campaign around your ‘love’ of the 2nd Amendment, why not demonize doctors into the bargain?

The good news about Docs-Glocks, however, is that it did result in the beginnings of a recognition on the part of physicians that they will only get back into the gun game if they bestir themselves and begin to argue for that role. Last April all the major medical associations issued a ‘Call To Acton,’ which not only endorsed the usual menu of gun-control options (background checks, assault-rifle ban, etc.,) but also made a commitment to be “part” of the solution to gun violence.  Which means that, like it or not, physicians must continue to advocate for the widest possible freedom in talking to patients about guns.

The problem with this more activist approach is that if physicians are going to engage in  unfettered, candid discussions with patients about guns, they have to know how to frame the discussions in ways that are both understandable and meaningful to their patients.  After all, the fact that the medical profession has decided that gun violence constitutes a serious medical issue does not, ipso facto, mean that doctors know how to explain the medical risks of gun ownership.  Knowing that guns are the instrument used in 31,000 fatalities and 70,000 injuries each year is one thing; knowing how to use that information medically is something else.

This is the context in which the survey in MD Magazine needs to be understood because the results indicate that many doctors do not currently engage in gun counseling, nor do they consider gun ownership a proper issue about which they should be concerned.  The survey, conducted online, was answered by 928 subscribers to the magazine.  When asked if doctors should “play a role in curbing in gun violence,” 43% said ‘no,’ 40% said ‘yes.’  When asked if they had ever asked patients about gun ownership, 60% said ‘no,’ and 40% said ‘yes.’ It also turned out that 60% of the survey responders claimed to be gun owners which is a rather remarkable statistic for physicians, assuming that this magazine’s readership is at all representative of the medical profession as a whole.

If nothing else, this survey reflects the fact that, until now, medicine has not developed a clear and coherent medical response to gun violence at the level where it is needed most; namely, in discussions between care-givers and patients, which is ultimately where all medical responses to any kind of medical risk needs to start and end.  The MD Magazine survey didn’t ask whether the survey respondents actually agreed that gun violence was a health issue.  Maybe the magazine’s subscribers practice medicine on Mars.

 

When It Comes To Assault Rifles, The Gun Industry Has A New Friend: The New York Times.

There’s a video floating around that shows Rupert Neate, a reporter from The Guardian, being heaved out of the Shot Show because he walked up to the Smith & Wesson display and began asking a company employee about an assault rifle ban.  This conversation took place as a member of Smith & Wesson’s marketing team happily placed an assault rifle in Neate’s hands and kept referring to it as a “modern sporting rifle,” although to be fair the gun, known as the AR-15 Sporter, fires only an itty-bitty 22-caliber cartridge, as opposed to the more lethal 5.56 or .223 military calibers that most so-called modern sporting rifles use.

              This nonsense about how a remarkably-lethal weapon used by our armed forces has been transmogrified into a ‘sporting’ gun by the gun industry for the last twenty years has been going on since the imposition of the 10-year assault weapons ban back in 1994.  The gun industry first reacted to the ban by claiming that ‘assault’ weapons were fully-automatic guns used only by the military; hence, any semi-automatic rifle deserved to be sold in the civilian market regardless of its design. And when the ban was not renewed in 2004, the industry went whole hog in trying to convince everyone that an AR-15 gun, as long as it didn’t fire more than one shot with each pull of the trigger, was no different from Grandpa’s old Remington or Winchester hunting rifle except it had a more modern look.

In arguing against any new attempt to impose a new assault weapons ban, the gun industry has cited again and again the Koper study, published as the ban was expiring, which could not, according to the author, definitively determine the effects of the ban on rates of gun crime.  But this study, commissioned by the Department of Justice, has also been cited by proponents of a ban as showing that changing the design of assault rifles and limiting the capacity of all semi-automatic gun magazines did, in fact, result in a reduction of gun crime. So once again it’s the old story in the gun debate: pro-gun advocates saying that government regulation doesn’t work, gun-control advocates saying it does.

Out of the woodwork we now have a major gun-control voice joining up with Gun Nation to proclaim that the assault weapons ban was a dud. And the voice belongs to none other than The New York Times, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning editorialist, Nicholas Kristof, has decided to share this “inconvenient truth” with his liberal colleagues in an evident attempt to get the GVP community to be  more realistic and honest in its approach to guns.  To quote Kristof, the gun debate should be driven by “evidence of what works,” and what didn’t work, was the assault weapons ban. To quote Kristof again, the law was “poorly drafted” and didn’t reduce gun crimes during the ten years it was in effect.

Far be it from me to challenge the ability of a Harvard and Oxford-educated journalist to read his sources clearly, but I have read the Koper report several times and Kristof’s attempt to align its contents with the views of the pro-gun mob just doesn’t work. First and foremost, the report compared only a few years of data before and after the ban when nearly all of the pre-ban guns were still in circulation and a majority of pistols were equipped with hi-cap mags. Furthermore, very few police jurisdictions collected data on magazine capacity of guns picked up at crime scenes, and the vaunted tracing data of the vaunted ATF turned out to be useless at best.

If Koper’s report says anything, it says that attempting to evaluate the impact of a weapons ban which expired before sufficient data even existed was an exercise that simply could not succeed.  Which is much different from concluding that the ban didn’t work. Kristof is correct in asking for evidence, not opinions, to shape the gun debate. He might show the way by doing it himself.

One More Gun-Free Zone Gives In To The Idea That Guns Protect Us From Crime.

This morning’s news contained an op-ed in the Daily Camera out of Boulder, CO, concerning the decision of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science to relax its rules on CCW and allow armed visitors to stroll through the museum’s halls.  The decision, according to the Museum, was made to bring the DMNS into compliance with Colorado’s concealed-carry law, passed in 2003, which gives state residents the right to take their personal weapons into most public spaces, although CCW is not allowed in schools.

              Want to know the most bizarre statement of all coming out of this mess?  According to the op-ed, authored by three leaders of Colorado GVP groups, a spokesperson for the Museum, Maureen O’Neal, defended the new policy by stating that a ‘deciding factor” was the desire of the Museum to keep its visitors “safe during the holiday season.” Does this woman have any idea how dumb she is?  Does the Museum have any idea that someone so stupid is actually speaking on behalf of an institution where education takes place?

And make no mistake about it – the Denver Museum, like all natural history museums, is first and foremost an educational institution, not just in terms of how exhibits are developed and displayed, but by the character and numbers of their visitors who, more often than not, are children from surrounding schools.  My children were all educated in New York City public schools and they all made frequent class trips to the Museum of Natural History (founded by Teddy Roosevelt’s father) located on Manhattan’s Central Park West.  I know about these trips because I often accompanied my kid’s class as a parent-chaperone, and not a single visit occurred without the children spending time in the educational area being given a lesson by a member of the Museum’s education staff.

Think it’s any different at the Denver Museum?  Take a look at their education website, which contains all kinds of resources for teachers and students, and note the 2014 Annual Report which claims that the Museum served as a resource that year for 299,000 teachers and kids.  Total attendance in 2014 was 1.4 million, which means that the educational component of the operation served the needs of more than one-fifth of the total number of visitors who walked through the Museum’s doors.

So when we talk about this museum and its role in the educational environment of Denver and surrounding communities, we’re not talking about Old Macdonald’s Farm. We’re talking about an institution that provides a needed educational component for school-age kids.  The fact is that when schoolchildren and teachers walk into that museum to study the exhibits and listen to a staff member explain what’s going on, they are as much in a classroom as they would be if they were sitting in their own school.

All that is needed is to classify the museum as constituting part of a school which is engaging in distance learning but is offering educational resources that kids receive when they are in class. Obviously, the Colorado legislators who voted for CCW did not believe that armed civilians enhanced school security – so let’s just slightly enlarge the definition of what constitutes a ‘school.’

By creating a gun-free zone, the particular institution is saying that bringing a gun into the area does not enhance safety or security at all. And despite the contrary statement by the Museum’s spokeswoman, there is absolutely no credible evidence pointing to an enhancement of public safety in areas where civilians can walk around armed. The claim that armed citizens protect us from millions of crimes each year is nonsense, and anecdotal evidence simply cannot overcome the fact that virtually all gun homicides occur in places where people own or have access to guns. The NRA is determined to root out gun-free zones because this makes gun ownership more accepted as a normal state of affairs. And right now the Denver Museum is going along with their plan.

 

Smith & Wesson Goes Fishing For A Big Fish. Will It Work?

I visited Smith & Wesson for the first time in 1978, came up to show my face and get the sporting goods VP, a nice gentleman named Del Shorb, to increase our wholesale allotment for the following year.  S&W was riding high back then, couldn’t ship enough 44-magnum ‘Dirty Harry’ revolvers, the newly-developed stainless steel guns were in demand, and everything appeared to be rosy for the iconic gun-maker whose brand name was probably as well-known as Coke.

              This was before the American gun market was invaded by European pistols, in particular Beretta, Glock and Sig, and literally overnight the fortunes of S&W began to ebb.  Things went from bad to worse when the company was purchased by a British investment group, Tompkins, who then entered into a disastrous agreement with the Clinton Administration, which led to a boycott which almost led to the company’s demise.  Eventually it all got sorted sorted out, the Clinton deal disappeared, a new ownership/management team took over and the company’s fortunes began to move forward again.

Yet despite the run-up in sales during the Age of Obama, gun companies like S&W know that tough times could lie ahead.  For one thing, every national election poses a risk that a pro-gun person will be sitting in the White House, which means that the fever to acquire guns before they are all ‘confiscated’ will die down.  For another, try as they might, gun companies find themselves selling most of their guns to people who already guns, and at a certain point even the most diehard gun enthusiast decides enough is enough. Which means that to maintain market presence and profits, publicly-owned gun manufacturers like Smith & Wesson need to think about selling something other than guns.

If you want to know what S&W is thinking, take a look at their new investor presentation that was distributed at SHOT.  It’s a glossy, 45-page catalog which may or may not presage an offering of new stock, but what caught my eye was the basic strategy statement which says the company intends to “expand organically and inorganically into adjacent and complementary markets.”  Which means either buy other companies or develop new products from within companies that you already own.

The possibility that S&W might acquire another gun company, Savage Arms, was the subject of an article in the Wall Street Journal this week.  Savage is part of Vista Outdoor, a collection of companies created by ATK, a major defense contractor who cobbled together guns, ammunition and outdoor sporting accessories with annual sales above $2 billion which is now on the block.

If S&W were to buy Vista, the company would immediately expand into all kids of adjacent and complimentary markets, because in addition to Savage, a leading manufacturer of long guns, the deal would also catapult S&W into a premier position in ammunition products, since Vista’s major holding is Federal Ammunition, whose presence and branding in the ammo market is huge.

The only problem in this strategy, however, is that none of these products will be able to sustain the performance of the last several years if something happens to slow or reverse the upward trend in gun sales. Few of the Vista brands can stand on their own outside the gun market, and shooting accessories only move off the shelves when consumers buy a gun.

What is most interesting about the investor’s presentation are several glossy pages devoted to new products from Smith & Wesson itself.  Except not a single new gun product is actually new. The 22-caliber shooter has been around for fifty years, the AR rifles have new accessory rails, the concealable Shield pistol has a ported barrel which makes no difference to performance at all.

The big run-up in gun company revenues doesn’t reflect new products or new customers. It reflects what has always driven gun sales – fears that guns will be taken away.  Try to build a multi-billion consumer-product company based on consumer fears?

Did Martin Luther King, Jr., Preach Against Gun Violence? In A Very Big Way.

Exactly one year before he was shot to death, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke out publicly against the Viet Nam War.  He did this in disagreement with many of his civil rights contemporaries, who were afraid he would fracture what was becoming a tenuous alliance with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, notwithstanding the fact that Viet Nam was a Democratic war.

              King’s opposition to the war was entirely consistent with his lifelong adherence to non-violence; simply put, he believed that using violence as a response to the social or economic ills that plagued mankind only produced more violence and could never be justified as the necessary means to achieve a desirable end.  I was at New York’s Riverside Church when King made his first anti-Viet Nam speech, and I recall how the emotions in that hall jumped as King accused his own country of using the same violence to quell the revolution in Southeast Asia as had been used to deny civil rights to African-Americans at home.

How much has changed in the nearly 50 years since Dr. King delivered that speech? I’d like to think that when it comes to the use of violence in response to social and economic problems, perhaps we have moved ahead.  But I’m not sure this is the case, and I’m certainly not about to say that we have learned how to separate the use of violence from the use of guns.

A day doesn’t go by without some pro-gun mouthpiece reminding us that guns protect us from crime.  And basically what they are all saying is that violence can and should be used against violence, except they don’t call it gun violence, they call it self-protection, freedom, and 2nd-Amendment rights. But make no mistake about it, when the NRA promotes CCW or Stand Your Ground laws, they are not only saying that violence is and should be a response to violence, they are asking for legal immunity for anyone taking that path. Now that most states have legalized unconditional CCW when it did not exist as a doctrine during Dr. King’s lifetime, shouldn’t we say that violence has become more, rather than less of an accepted social norm since his death?

Not only is violence sanctioned in the American legal fabric, but when efforts are made to curb violence through lawful means, the gun lobby and its sycophants in and out of the media resist such efforts on a continuous and usually successful basis.  Only 28 states have CAP laws which, by definition, would curb the unintended violence caused by accidental shootings, often committed by young children.  And if this isn’t bad enough, we have the disgraceful attempt by the NRA and several of its loony medical partners to demonize physicians for asking patients about access to guns, as if gun violence, as opposed to other forms of violence, lie outside the accepted purview of medical care.

We could blame this socially-acceptable diffusion of violence on the rhetorical excesses of the NRA, but Dr. King would be the first to object to such a facile explanation. Because in his 1967 speech, King was clear that we would not be able to reduce or eliminate violence at home if we did not find ways to reduce our use of organized, state-sanctioned violence abroad. And while I would like to say that we have learned this lesson from the debacle of Viet Nam, in fact it appears that each succeeding generation needs to re-learn this lesson again.  The $600 billion that we spent on the Pentagon in 2015 represents nearly 40% of military expenditures worldwide, and American military personnel are based in more than 100 countries that do not fly our flag.

Let’s not forget on Dr. King’s Day: the same President who signed the historic Voting Rights Act in 1965 signed the Gun Control Act in 1968.  In between those two dates, he sent half a million young men to Viet Nam.

Why Do I Own Guns? Because I Like To Own Guns.

I bought my first real gun in Florida when I was 12 years old.  A beautiful Smith & Wesson 38. Got it in a flea market somewhere on Highway 441.  Owned that gun for about 30 minutes until my Uncle Nat took it away from me and probably hocked it the next day.  He was right.  What the hell was a twelve-year old kid doing walking around with a gun?

 

Star 30-M

This purchase began a life-long addiction to guns which continues to this day.  Or at least until yesterday, when I walked into Dave’s Gun Shop and bought a Star Model 30M, a heavy, all-steel pistol that holds 15 rounds.  Why did I buy the gun?  Because I wanted to buy a gun.  Why does my wife buy shoes?  Because she likes shoes.

If I were a typical gun guy, I would tell you that I bought this gun because it’s good for self-defense.  I don’t often, if ever, carry a gun. Guns are lying around the house but none are close enough to be grabbed up if an intruder were to suddenly burst through the door, but I know that owning a gun makes me safer, which is why I bought the gun.

Actually, that’s not true.  I didn’t go into a gun shop yesterday because I was thinking about my personal safety. I didn’t walk up to the counter, take one look at that Star pistol and decide that this gun would protect me from crime. I certainly didn’t for one second imagine that buying that gun would somehow make me ‘free.’  I bought the gun because I wanted to buy a gun.

This may have been the third time I owned this gun.  I had a Star 30M back in the mid-90’s; sold it to some guy in my gun shop who then sold it back because he needed a set of tires for his truck; sold it later to another guy who probably at some point traded it at Dave’s shop where it was sitting when I made it mine.  You don’t see a Star 30M all that often, and it’s not as if the gun, or any gun for that matter, ever wears out. If this gun had been picked up at a crime scene instead of being sold to me, the ATF trace would show that the gun went into private hands somewhere around 1995.  But it went into private hands and then back into an FFL inventory at least two more times over the intervening twenty years.  So much for the value of ATF traces and as well as the nonsensical discussions about Time to Crime.

On the NRA website, Wayne LaPierre tells the NRA membership that “nothing would make us more vulnerable to generations of suffering and slaughter than the destruction of our 2nd Amendment.”  There’s about as much reality behind this statement as the idea that I bought that Star pistol to protect myself from crime.  I live in a White, middle class neighborhood – if anyone ever tried to break into my house it would probably be my drunk neighbor who thought he had come home and forgot his keys.

I have personally owned, bought and sold, probably 500 guns over the course of my lifetime, and I can say that in all those transactions going back to 1956, I never once asked myself why I needed any particular gun. But if someone were to ask me why I bought and sold all those guns, I might rattle off something about crime, or terrorism, or my Constitutional ‘rights.’ After all, I have to come up with some kind of answer, and it’s not as if people who don’t like guns can offer me a clue.

In crafting sensible solutions to gun violence, my friends in the GVP community have to understand that any new law will force me to somehow change this impulsive habit.  And when was the last time you stayed on that low carbs diet?