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Do Guns Protect Us? Lott Says Yes, Violence Policy Center Says No.

January 10, 2015

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The gun lobby was understandably quiet after the tragic shooting of Veronica Rutledge by her two-year old son in the Hayden, ID, Walmart.  After all, it’s pretty tough to reconcile the human cost of such carelessness with the notion that people walking around with guns make themselves and others more safe.  But sooner or later you can always count on John Lott, the author of More Guns, Less Crime to stomp into territory where others fear to tread, and he’s done it in this case with a Fox News blog in which he accuses the media of playing up the few instances of accidental shootings involving folks who legally carry guns, while ignoring or downplaying the many instances in which gun-carrying citizens protected themselves and others from crime.

John Lott

John Lott

Lott’s been on this bandwagon about how guns protect us from crime for the past twenty years, and his alleged research is cited again and again by politicians and pro-gun enthusiasts who believe America should be fully armed. The only problem is that not only has his research been debunked by other scholars time and time again, but when a panel of criminologists asked him to furnish his data so that they could replicate his results, at first he couldn’t produce any data, and when he was submitted a ‘revised’ dataset, the subsequent analysis also didn’t hold up. But Lott isn’t interested in being a scholar; he’s promoting the value of owning guns.

Which is fine as far as it goes. A man has to earn a living after all. But Lott’s one-sided approach not only forces him to make arguments not supported by facts, but also to ignore data which, at the very least, throws the whole notion of CCW for personal defense up for grabs.  I am referring here to the ongoing project of the Violence Policy Center to track killings by concealed-carry licensees, which shows that more than 600 people with CCW killed themselves or others since 2007.  The study, of course, is based on media reports that have come to the attention of the VPC, so it is necessarily incomplete, and I suspect that in the suicide category, which comprises slightly less than one-third of the shootings, the real number is substantially higher than what is estimated to have really occurred.

vpclogo                Most disturbing in the VPC report were the 29 mass shootings committed by CCW-legal individuals which resulted in 147 deaths, including 13 suicides by the shooters themselves.  What is most concerning about this category is that we all assume that individuals who commit mass shootings are the most deranged and disturbed among us, and it’s the gun lobby more than any other group that has vociferously demanded that better screening be put in place to keep mentally-unbalanced individuals from getting their hands on guns.  But it’s also assumed that when a jurisdiction grants a CCW permit, the scrutiny of that individual’s fitness goes beyond a mere background check. The data gathered by the VPC shows this assumption, like many of the assumptions about the value of CCW, to be wrong.

Lott gives the whole thing away and shows his true motives when he says that, “If Americans only hear about the bad things that happen with guns, they will be much more likely to support strict gun regulations.”  And since more regulation usually leads to fewer guns, this is certainly not the direction which the gun lobby would like us to take.  But simply claiming that guns make us safer while ignoring studies like the VPC report may play well to zealots like Ted Nugent and the NRA crowd, but it’s not in accord with the facts.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m licensed for CCW and I carry a gun from time to time.  So I’m not opposed per se to the notion that guns do more harm than good.  What I do oppose is constructing an argument for either position out of whole cloth, and John Lott has been stitching such an argument for longer than he should.

When It Comes To Guns, Physicians Should Forget The Hippocratic Oath.

January 8, 2015

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Now that America finally has a Surgeon General, you would think that the debate over his appointment would give way to an honest and serious effort to evaluate Vivek Murthy’s performance as he leads the nation’s public health effort for at least the next two years. But there’s one guy out there who simply can’t leave the issue behind, and as he continues to fulminate over Obama’s choice for Surgeon General, the hot air and the lies continue to expand.  I am referring to Tim Wheeler, the sometime head of an alleged organization which claims to represent thousands of physicians who support ‘responsible’ ownership of guns.  The NRA has been pushing this quack into the public arena ever since the gun lobby decided that the listing of gun violence as a public health problem meant that physicians had become, to gun owners, Public Enemy Number 1.

Vivek Murthy, M.D.

Vivek Murthy, M.D.

I didn’t notice the automobile industry attacking physicians when car accidents made the list as a public health problem.  In fact, Detroit collaborated with public health researchers when it came to designing and producing safer cars.  The same could also be said of the household recreation industry which helped craft legislation passed by state after state which mandated that fences be installed around all in-ground, backyard pools.  But somehow the gun industry decided that its products not only did more good than harm, but decided that they did so much more good than harm that the issues of lethality and safety risks didn’t need to be discussed at all.  Enter Timothy Wheeler, who has doggedly led the fight to disconnect physicians from any public discussion or publicly-funded research about guns.  And if you doubt the validity of anything he says, remember, this is a guy who claims to be an M.D.

Now I’m not an M.D. but I can do simple math.  And if guns are the method of choice in 100,000 fatal and non-fatal but serious injuries each year, then we’re not talking about chopped liver in medical terms.  We’re talking about a medical condition which costs countless lives, billions of dollars and untold family trauma each year, the human results of which inevitably end up in a critical-care treatment bay with the terrified family and friends waiting to be told whether they’ll ever be able to speak to the shooting victim again.

 

Wheeler’s latest effort to spread misinformation and stupidity about the role of physicians in gun violence is an op-ed on the National Review website which features his bizarre frothings from time to time. In this particular effort, he not only takes aim at Murthy and the potential danger that he represents for gun owners over the next several years, but he also repeats the fiction that physicians have no right to invade patients’ privacy by advocating “gun control” in the examining room.

If Wheeler is so lacking in the most rudimentary understanding of how medical professionals attempt to asses patient risk he can be excused if only because he may not know how much disinformation he’s handing out.  But if he’s aware of how physicians are trained to assess medical risk then he’s just pandering to an audience who can be excused for not knowing what Wheeler’s supposed to be talking about.

Physicians usually begin an examination by asking the patient how he or she feels.  The answer to that question prompts the next question,  the answer to the next question prompts a third, a fourth and as many questions and answers as the physician needs to ask in  order to assess the health risk of the patient sitting in the examination room.  To place any limits on the doctor-patient exchange of information is to ask a physician to violate the Hippocratic oath.  But Wheeler’s not interested in the method that physicians use to reduce harm.  He’s interested in helping the NRA marketing team, which means he’ll say whatever the gun industry needs to have said in order to sell guns.  He’s a good salesman from that point of view; as a physician he says things that simply aren’t true.

What Really Happened In Hayden.

January 8, 2015

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By sheer coincidence, I first heard about the tragic death of Veronica Rutledge while I was visiting my step-son, his wife and his three-year old daughter.  In fact, little Aliza was sitting right in front of me as I caught a bit of the story out of Hayden, and I couldn’t believe that a child who was even younger than my stepdaughter could have reached into a pocketbook, pulled out a 9mm pistol, somehow got his hand around the grip and shot it off.

My unease with the facts of the story grew greater when I then watched a report from KREM-TV, the station with reporters on the ground in Hayden, which showed a picture of the alleged weapon, which appeared to be a Smith & Wesson Model 3913.  The 3913 is a mid-size pistol which, at least in the pic on KREM, shoots double-action only, which means a very long trigger pull. This is not a gun that a two-year old, it seems to me, could very easily (if at all) either hold or shoot.  The story simply didn’t seem to fit and it was even more confusing because most of the ‘details’ about the victim’s purse, her training with guns and so forth were actually statements made by her father-in-law, who was nowhere near the Walmart when the tragic shooting occurred.

shield            On December 31, the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Department issued a formal statement about the shooting and this clarified things for me in one respect but created an even greater sense of unease in another.  It turns out that Veronica Rutledge was shot with a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol, but it was a gun called The Shield, which is one of the smaller and more compact full-caliber guns available to buy.  The Shield was designed for the concealed-carry market and with a total length of just 6 inches and an unloaded weight of slightly more than one pound, the gun slips easily into a purse and can be operated without difficulty by someone with small hands.  In other words, it’s the perfect gun for a woman who, like Veronica Rutledge, wanted to walk around with a gun.

It’s also a gun that could be grabbed and shot by a little kid since the gun’s action, known as striker fire, was specifically developed for use by law enforcement personnel who might need to activate the firing mechanism quickly without disengaging an external safety or being slowed by a long or heavy trigger ‘creep.’ The striker design was developed by Glock and when Smith & Wesson decided to revamp its pistol line to compete with the Austrian gun maker, they outfitted all their police guns with the striker-fired design.

This explains how a very young child might have been able to pick up his mother’s gun and shoot off a round.  But the story also has a rather disquieting side because in August, 2013 Smith & Wesson recalled every single Shield pistol manufactured to date.  The reason was to fix a flaw in the trigger which could result in the gun discharging if it were dropped. Which means that the gun might discharge with the trigger hardly being pulled.

I don’t know when Veronica Rutledge purchased her Shield or when it was made.  But if what I said about the defect was true for her gun, we may not just be talking about a terrible accident.  We may be talking about wrongful death.  On the other hand, no matter how and why Veronica Rutledge died, the important question isn’t whether the gun worked properly or not.  The only real question is why was the gun in her purse?  Her family said she was ‘raised’ around guns.  That’s not much of a reason to lose your life – it’s really not.

 

PBS’ Gunned Down: My Review

January 7, 2015

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As an NRA Life Member, I get emails from all the pro-gun organizations and the last several days my Inbox had plenty of communications about the PBS documentary which aired last night. As you can also probably imagine, the warnings from the pro-gun crowd ran from dire to much worse.  I should add that in this case I was also contacted by PBS who asked me to preview the show which I did, and here’s what I saw.

My gun friends who subscribe to the Charlton Heston battle-cry “from my cold, dead hands” had nothing to fear. The documentary is an extremely balanced view of the NRA’s defeat of the federal gun bills in 1999 and again in 2013. Some of the program’s newsreel footage is not for the faint of heart, particularly films from Columbine High School, the shooting of Gabby Giffords and the slaughter at Sandy Hook.  There is also some candid commentary from pro-gun advocates like Larry Pratt and an emotion-laden “How could they vote that way?” complaint from Vice President Joe.  None of the current NRA leadership would agree to be interviewed but they really had nothing to fear since the film covers the rise and current stance of Wayne LaPierre and his team in a balanced and honest way.

heston                The program follows the transformation of the NRA from an organization devoted to hunting and sport shooting to one focused primarily on beating back gun control efforts in Washington, D.C.  This changed with the emergence of Wayne LaPierre and a coterie of hard-core, conservative board members who then found themselves on the losing end of legislative battles in 1993-94 (Brady bill and assault weapons ban) but would never again wind up on the short end.  Gunned Down does not really explain how this shift in direction and message suddenly became (and still remains) so successful, given that the geography (Southern) and demographics (blue-collar White males) of the membership has not substantially changed.

One of the key moments in the NRA’s rise to lobbying power, according to Gunned Down, was the NRA’s allegedly decisive role in the 2000 electoral victory of George W. Bush.  The narrative is based primarily on post-election statements by Clinton who said that Gore lost because of NRA voters in Ohio, Arkansas and Gore’s home state of Tennessee.  But Tennessee, like most of the South, was gradually shifting blue to red well before the 2000 election, with Clinton-Gore receiving a smaller percentage of the total vote in 1996 than in 1992.  What probably swung Ohio into the 2000 Bush column was the increased activity of Evangelicals, who would then play a decisive role in Bush’s re-election in 2004.  Given the fact that two-thirds of the NRA membership live in Southern and border states, it shouldn’t surprise that NRA-backed candidates are strong south of the Mason-Dixon line.  On the other hand, the NRA mounted a big push last year to toss out Connecticut’s incumbent Governor, Dannel Malloy, but the fact that Malloy rammed through a major rewrite of the state’s gun law after Sandy Hook didn’t hurt him one bit.

Given its time-frame, the PBS documentary does not cover a tectonic shift in the gun-control landscape that has occurred over the past 18 months. I am referring to energetic and sustained grass-roots efforts by groups like Everytown and Colorado Ceasefire, the latter playing a formative role in the expansion of Colorado background checks in 2013.  Everytown now claims more than 2.5 million supporters, not bad for an organization that started operating the day after Sandy Hook.  The NRA makes headlines when the focus is on Washington, D.C., but they have never garnered the kind of media attention that Shannon Watts and her group received when they got Target to ask its customers not to bring guns into their stores.

It won’t be easy for the gun lobby to paint this production as just another example of how the liberal media scorns the value of guns. But the media may soon realize that what was once a good story may now need a different end.

 

Will Gun Registration Lead To Confiscation? Let’s Stop Arguing About That One – Please.

January 5, 2015

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One of the arguments used by the NRA to fight gun laws is the idea that any new gun law will lead to gun registration which will then lead to gun confiscation.  And since everyone knows that disarming citizens is a tried-and-true method for consolidating tyranny, pro-gun organizations like the NRA keep us ‘free’ by vigilantly opposing anything that might result in the registration of guns.

I don’t think that organizations promoting common-sense policies to keep guns out of the wrong hands (e.g., universal background checks) should underestimate the degree to which this argument about gun registration is not only very potent among gun owners, but may also play well amongst a much wider segment of the American population as a whole, gun owners or not.  This is because we have a long and deep tradition of privacy in this country and as such, we enjoy protections from government intrusions that do not exist anywhere else.

10734                The cornerstone of this legal tradition is the 4th Amendment, which basically prohibits search and seizure by government agents without probable cause.  And while the judiciary has argued back and forth over how to define probable cause, the bottom line is that law enforcement officers cannot enter your premises without a duly-executed warrant, nor can they present evidence seized in this way in court, and this exclusion applies to not only the residence, but usually to one’s vehicle as well.

As long as there is no universal registration requirement, gun ownership, in and of itself, doesn’t constitute a crime.  For that matter, even if I decide to sell my gun privately to someone who then uses the gun to commit a crime, I still haven’t done anything wrong.  So the idea that government should be able to know who owns guns and who doesn’t only makes sense if such data could be used to keep guns out of the wrong hands.  Which is the whole point of universal background checks.  Except why should the government know what kind of guns I own even if I decide to sell one of them to someone else?

There is nothing in the background check legislation that recently passed at the state level or has been contemplated at the federal level that supports the idea that somehow the government will use this data to build a massive gun registration list covering all gun owners and their guns.  But it doesn’t hurt the argument that registration equals confiscation when the media blabs endlessly about invasions of personal privacy via the internet, GPS, telephones and God knows just about everything else.  Last year the pro-gun blogs carried endless stories warning their readers about alleged traffic stops in which law enforcement agents allegedly driver’s license information to determine whether or not the individual in question owned guns and therefore might be carrying a weapon without a non-resident CCW from the state where the traffic stop took place.

The only thing that can be learned from running a check on a driver’s license is whether the license is active and, in some cases, whether the individual to whom the license belongs is the subject of an outstanding warrant or other criminal complaint. But see how far you get trying to convince some of our more zealous 2nd Amendment guardians that some kind of universal gun-owning database isn’t being built and/or doesn’t already exist.  After all, more than 40% of Americans believe that God created the human species some 10,000 years ago, so it’s not as if much of what we believe about anything is necessarily bolstered by science or fact.

The challenge for advocates promoting common-sense policies to reduce gun violence is to acknowledge that privacy, guns or no guns, is a legitimate concern and, as I said earlier, owning a gun is no crime.  If registration, either directly or indirectly will help reduce the mortality and morbidity of guns, a way has to be found to make legitimate gun owners feel that gun ownership will not be threatened even if government needs to know about their guns.

For an interesting approach to privacy, click here.

Why Wait To Ask Congress For Universal Background Checks?

January 4, 2015

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Shannon Watts just gave a detailed and articulate response to the Pew poll which shows that a slim majority of Americans now believe that “gun rights” are more important that “gun control.”  And as Shannon points out, the either-or question makes it really impossible for any poll respondent to address the fact that supporting the 2nd Amendment doesn’t ipso facto mean that someone  also can’t support common-sense measures to curb gun violence, like expanded background checks.

At this point the strategy of Shannon and other gun-sense advocates appears to focus on policies enacted at the state level (e.g., expanding background checks) combined with localized, grass-roots efforts to engage corporations like Target and Starbucks to subscribe to gun-free zones.  Given the 2013 defeat of Manchin-Toomey, energies at the federal level appear to be more distant and long-term, with the goal towards electing members of Congress who might eventually vote the other way. On the other hand, I happen to think that Manchin-Toomey was not quite the NRA bone-crusher that it was described to be.  If anything, I was surprised at the closeness of the Senate vote and I’m not sure that gun control at the federal level is as dead as many on both sides would like to believe.

Shannon Watts

Shannon Watts

The fact is that had background checks been extended to cover all private transactions, and if, as Shannon says, private transactions account for 40% of all movement of guns, then what Manchin-Toomey represented was an enormous expansion of government control over what gun owners can and cannot do with their guns. This would have been the fourth time that the federal government, beginning in 1938, regulated the ownership and transfer of civilian guns, but in all three prior instances, the regulation was aimed at the behavior of federally-licensed dealers and said nothing about the behavior of gun owners themselves.

The 1938 law created the federal gun license and mandated that dealers could only sell guns to residents of their own state.  The original federal firearms license, or FFL, cost one buck.  The 1968 law, known as GCA68, established certain categories of ‘prohibited persons,’ i.e., felons, mentally ill, drug addicts, fugitives, et.al., but again prohibited federally-licensed dealers, not individual gun owners, from engaging in transactions with such individuals and also prohibited private individuals from buying mail-order guns if they came from another state.  Finally, the 1993 Brady Bill updated the process that allowed dealers to determine by contacting the FBI at the point of sale whether the purchaser was telling the truth about not being prohibited from owning a gun.

The bill proposed after Sandy Hook was a horse of a different color altogether.  It left government regulation of federal dealers intact but for the first time gave government the right to regulate the behavior of gun owners themselves as to how, when and where those selfsame gun owners could sell or acquire guns.  In one fell swoop, the government would go from looking over the dealer’s shoulder while a transaction was being conducted inside the shop, to looking over the shoulder of every gun owner if/when that owner decided to make any change in the number or type of guns that he owned.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not making any kind of argument against the reasonableness of universal background checks.  What I am suggesting, however, is that extending background checks to almost all gun transactions is almost a tectonic change in the regulatory authority of the Federal government, and I don’t know any changes of such scope that happen all at once.

The bill that became GCA68 was first introduced in 1963.  The Brady Bill spent six years floating around Congress before it became law.  Both were signed by Presidents who just happened to come from gun-rich states.  I’m not so sure that energetic and effective advocates like Shannon need to forget going directly to Congress until after 2016.  After all, like we say in the gun business, it never hurts to show the product, even if this year’s buying season has come and gone.

 

 

 

Want To Get Rid Of Gun Accidents? Get Rid Of Guns.

January 2, 2015

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It took both sides in the gun debate about two days to respond to the horrific incident in Hayden, ID and as usual, both sides behaved in kind.  Pro-gun bloggers like Robert Farago immediately attacked gun-control organizations as “bloody shirt wavers of the civilian disarmament industrial complex” because they suggested that Veronica Rutledge probably had “little” required training.  Robert can be excused for his flights into rhetorical hyperbole because:  a) his audience expects it;  and, b) his audience expects it.  But the proof he offered to contradict the claim of insufficient training, a statement from the Idaho CCW manual about the student needing to shoot a whole, big 98 rounds actually underscores what Ladd Everitt’s Coalition to Stop Gun Violence actually said.  Poor Veronica Rutledge held a CCW permit from Washington State, by the way, so Farago’s attempt to push back on the Coalition’s statement was both silly and wrong.

kid guns                Not that pundits on the other side of the issue were necessarily any more discerning in trying to explain the how’s and why’s of the tragedy at the Walmart store.  On Wednesday, the Boston Globe ran a major editorial on the incident by Michael Cohen, who is a Fellow at the Century Foundation, a liberal think-tank that was started by Edward Filene, who also founded the Filene Department Store chain.  I love think tanks that claim to be “non-partisan” but somehow always wind up on one side of the fence.  I guess it has to do with their tax-exempt status or maybe they actually believe that their approach to certain issues embraces all sides of the political spectrum; it’s no wonder the Century Foundation isn’t known for speaking out about guns.

In any case, Michael Cohen says right up front that he’s “no fan of guns.” He also believes, and here all the evidence certainly comes down on his side,  that guns don’t make us safer and that, in fact, firearm ownership increases the risk that someone will be injured or killed with a gun.  He takes issue with the cops in Hayden who termed the shooting a ‘tragic accident’ because, according to Cohen, it was an avoidable tragedy and not an accident of any kind.  “These incidents,” concludes Cohen, “will continue as long as gun-owning parents remain lax when it comes to the issue of gun safety.”

Let me make one thing very clear.  I am the last person who would ever give gun owners a ‘pass’ on locking up or locking away their guns. And I have drawn my share of fire from pro-gun zealots like Farago whenever I argue that, NRA-inspired nonsense to the contrary, guns simply don’t make us safe. But I think that advocates like Cohen need to ask themselves how to really explain the lethality of guns because otherwise they may end up making arguments which just don’t bear any fruit.

According to the CDC, intentional gun deaths have risen from 27,427 in 1999 to 32,288 in 2012, an increase of 18%, most of the increase coming from gun suicides but gun homicides are up as well.  Over the same period, unintentional gun deaths (like the unfortunate death of Veronica Rutledge) have dropped from 824 to 548, a decline of 33%.  During these same fourteen years, accidental deaths from machinery have stayed exactly the same;  accidental drownings have also remained just where they were. There is no other category of unintentional fatal injuries that has shown the same degree of decline as the decline in fatal accidents involving guns.

Let me break the news gently to Michael Cohen and his friends who are concerned about violence from guns.  As emotional and frightening as the incident in Hayden may be, when only 548 people die yearly from gun accidents in a country which contains more than 300 million guns, the only way that unintentional gun injuries will completely disappear is if we get rid of all the guns. Remember lawn darts?

 

Can Logic And Facts Sway The Gun Debate? I’m Not Sure.

January 2, 2015

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Want to really piss off the gun crowd? Refer to guns as ‘toys.’  I did it in a recent column and the gun folks went bonkers – called me all kinds of names, used it as the penultimate ‘proof’ that Mike the Gun Guy is really an enemy of the 2nd Amendment, and so forth.  So I thought I would spend a few paragraphs explaining the reasons for the remarkable vitriol that ‘guns as toys’ provokes, because it says a great deal about why the two sides in the gun safety debate have such difficulty coming together on anything that even faintly smacks of a similar point of view.

I was eight years old in 1952 when I got my first Daisy Red Ryder by sending in ten dollars and an advertisement from the Boy Scout magazine, Boys’ Life.  I spent thousands of hours playing Cowboys and Indians with that gun in my back yard, and so did all the other boys.  When I was ten years old I joined the NRA so that I could shoot 22-caliber, bolt-action training rifles that the government gave my brother’s rifle team that practiced in the shooting range of his junior high school located in the middle of Washington, D.C.  I knew those guns were real and that my Red Ryder was a toy.  But I got that same, enjoyable feeling when I played with one or shot the other, and I still get that same, enjoyable feeling when I go to the gun range today.

Sometime in the 1980s the notion that guns were fun started to be replaced with the idea that guns were a serious and necessary way to protect us from crime.  These cultural chickens came home to roost during the Los Angeles riots that broke out after a jury delivered its ‘not guilty’ verdict to the cops who beat up Rodney King.  The second night of the riots a television crew filmed several Black youths pulling a guy out of his car and beating him senseless as he stumbled across the street.  If you owned a gun shop anywhere in the United States, you were able to sell every gun on your shelves the next day.

heston                The NRA ramped up its rhetoric about guns being essential for safety and security during the debates which led to the passage of the Brady Bill and Assault Weapons Ban in 1993-94. And since then, the gun industry and its promoters have wrapped themselves in an almost religious mantra combining love of family, love of freedom and love of guns.  Guns are no longer used just for hunting and sport, they are sacred instruments that sanctify the Biblical requirement to protect ourselves and our families from harm.

Meanwhile, the evidence keeps mounting that gun ownership creates risks in terms of injuries and deaths that no amount of emotion-charged rhetoric can obscure.  In terms of morbidity and mortality, guns do much more harm than good.  The bogus argument that guns prevent ‘millions’ of crimes from  being committed each year just can’t withstand the simple logic stated by Elmore Leonard, “Don’t fool with guns in here, okay? The goddamn piece’s liable to go off.”  But the fact that it’s liable to go off, the way it went off in Hayden, ID, isn’t necessarily a reason to prohibit or even control ownership of guns. After all, nobody argues about the ‘benefits’ of smoking, but people can still go into the corner drugstore and buy their cigarettes.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that gun owners are stupid or irrational when they defend their right to own guns.  But maybe it’s time to stop thinking that appealing to logic and citing ‘facts’ about gun violence will carry the day.  I’m willing to accept the risks of gun ownership for the simple reason that I like my guns.  And like most risks, I can’t believe that something bad will ever happen to me. Then again, my doctor keeps telling me to lose weight but that piece of lemon-meringue pie looks just too good to pass up.

 

What Was Different About The Shooting in Hayden? A Lot.

January 1, 2015

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If you are concerned about gun violence, then sooner or later you’ll have to spend some time looking at the extraordinary data collected by the CDC and housed in an online repository known as the National Violent Death Reporting System, aka the NVDRS. The data only covers reports from 32 states, many of them recently added, but it is so rich and so comprehensive as regards gun mortality and morbidity that it simply cannot be neglected by anyone who wants to go beyond the headlines of the gun debate and understand the issues from an objective point of view.

You can save yourself a lot of time and energy (as well as cutting through the bureaucratic red-tape that is often required to get access to the raw data) by simply accessing the relevant Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports (MMWR) published by the CDC based on information from the NVDRS.  The data in the NVDRS is valuable because it is drawn largely from coroner’s reports, which are not only extremely detailed as regards the circumstances of the injury, but also tend to be comprehensive because coroners must report to state health departments which then report directly to the CDC.  I am constantly surprised at how much critical information, like national incomes, population and employment are based on estimates, rather than comprehensive numbers.  The NVDRS, on the other hand, is the real McCoy.

hayden                Following the bizarre incident in the Hayden, ID Wal-Mart, where a two-year old evidently discharged his mother’s concealed handgun, instantly killing her, I decided to look at this not from the vague media reports coming from the scene, not based on a few, online messages from grieving relatives and friends, and certainly not from the pronouncements that will now follow about ‘responsibility,’ ‘safety,’ ‘a learning moment,’ or any of the other bromides that have already begun to circulate about an event which we have witnessed many times before and will no doubt witness many times again. Rather, I want to see what I can learn about the death of Veronica Rutledge by comparing what I know and don’t know about her demise to the data on such events collected by the NVDRS and published by the CDC.

The last MMWR on unintentional gun deaths covers 16 states who reported data in 2010. Two of the states, like Idaho, were Western states (Utah and Colorado), several others were Mid-western states (Michigan and Ohio), five were Southeastern states, in other words, a good mix.  Unintentional firearm deaths were less than 1% of all gun mortality (97% were suicides and homicides) which would be about par if we had data for all 50 states.  An unintentional firearm death is defined as “a death that results from a penetrating injury or gunshot wound from a weapon that uses a powder charge to fire a projectile and for which a preponderance of evidence indicates that the shooting was not directed intentionally at the decedent.” Now I’m sorry if this is all very dry and somewhat obtuse but again, that’s what research into gun violence is all about. And it’s clear from the little bit that we know from Hayden, at least we can assume that the shooter in this case did not intentionally discharge the gun.

Here are some additional comparisons between Hayden and the unintentional gun deaths analyzed for 16 states in 2010.  December was the lowest month for these incidents which makes the event in Hayden somewhat rare.  In 2010 there was not a single, unintentional gun death in a public store, with two-thirds taking place in homes.  More than 60% of the incidents involved handguns and three-quarters of the victims were White, but only 15% were women. Three-quarters of the shootings occurred because the gun went off “accidentally” or some other “mechanical” event took place.

To sum up:  Accidental shootings don’t usually take place in December, they don’t involve women as victims and they don’t occur in public space.  So what was a woman doing walking through WalMart during the Christmas holidays with a loaded gun?

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