It’s Time To Learn Something About Guns.
Last week our friends at the Hopkins-Bloomberg school put
up a website with an twelve-hour, online course about gun violence which can be
accessed right here. The
course covers all the essential issues swirling around the gun-violence debate
today, including reviews of relevant laws and comprehensive discussions of what
we know and what we still don’t know about the behavior that kills and injures
more than 125,000 Americans every year.
This is, as far as I can tell, the first attempt to
create a serious and comprehensive effort not only to explain gun violence, but
to give both specialists and advocates a clear roadmap that can be used to understand
what gun violence is all about. And it couldn’t have been done at a more germane
time, given the degree to which gun violence has become something of a litmus
test for every wannabe 2020 Presidential candidate,
at least on the Democratic side. Whether there will be more than one GOP candidate remains to be seen, ha ha
ha.
In addition to classroom presentations by members of
the Hopkins faculty’ along with some invited academic guests, each subject also
contains a very detailed bibliography of relevant published research. This is
the first time any group has mounted a serious effort to create a collection of
documentation
on gun violence which can be used to further inform the gun-control community
about the research that lies behind our understanding about violence caused by
guns. The bibliography contains more than 125(!) separate references, and can
be printed out or saved for further use. Frankly, this resource alone is a
reason why every gun-control advocate or activist should enroll and take this
course.
As of this morning, the course registration stands at
slightly more than 2,000 hardy souls. That number is an embarrassment, it’s a
joke. It tells me that what I have said (and gotten criticized for saying) about
the gun-control movement, or how they refer to themselves as the gun violence
prevention movement or GVP, namely,
that most of the folks who claim to be so concerned about gun violence are no
more interested to understanding the issue than the bunch promoting 2nd-Amendment
‘rights’ on the other side.
When Art Kellerman and Fred Rivara published their
formative articles on gun violence back in the early 1990’s, the pro-gun
movement responded
by launching attacks on this effort which, from a scientific point of view,
were nothing more than errant nonsense or worse. Public health research on gun
violence was derided as fake, un-American and designed to be used by government
to take away everyone’s guns. If anything, this campaign set the tone for the
more recent iteration of the alt-right’s response to science and scientific
research known as ‘fake’ news.
I would be much less concerned about the gun lobby’s strategy
to eliminate or downplay the need for gun research were it not for the fact that
most of the folks on my side of the fence do not seem all that concerned about absorbing
the lessons that can be derived from such research themselves. Last year I
mounted a survey which
asked gun-control activists to answer 12 questions about gun laws, all the
questions covering basic information being used by advocacy groups to define
their strategies about violence caused by guns. The little quiz has been taken
by several hundred folks and the average score has been six correct; in other
words, a big, fat flunk. Given the fact that most GVP activists (like 90 percent) hold post-graduate degrees, the
lack of basic knowledge in the GVP
community is a deplorable state of affairs.
I think that gun-control organizations like Brady and
Everytown should not only be actively promoting the Hopkins gun-violence
course, but should be telling, indeed insisting that their members and
supporters register and sign up for the course – now! To quote Terry Goodkind,
“Knowledge is a weapon and I intend to be formidably armed.”
Armed with a gun or armed with the facts. Which do you choose?
