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Dana Loesch Opens Her Mouth About Guns And Gets It Wrong Again.

November 19, 2015

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When the NRA has to join forces with the paranoid fantasists who shoot their mouths off on The Blaze, you know that a decision has been made by the folks in Fairfax to abandon even a shred of reality-based discussion in order to hold onto their ever-dwindling base.  And like it or not, the number of Americans who own guns keeps dropping, which means that in order to sell more guns, a way has to be found to convince current gun owners to buy more, and more, and more.  And the game plan that has always worked in this regard is to sell the idea that Armageddon in the form of gun confiscation is right around the corner or lurking down the block.

The most successful use of this strategy occurred over the last seven years due to the fact that our President made no bones about the fact that he was, generally speaking, anti-gun.  So it was easy for the gun industry to remind its supporters that Obama was the tenant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a conclusion that spoke for itself.  Of course the problem now is that he can’t run again; but until January 20, 2017 we can remind the gun folks that he’s still capable of doing terrible things.

loeschnranews               And who better to push the most conspiratorial argument from this point of view than Dana Loesch, who got going as a right-wing noisemaker promoting her own, nutty view of the world on The Blaze, but has now been hired by the NRA.  And her inaugural video, which floated onto YouTube yesterday, is a combination of conspiracy, fear-mongering and downright falsehoods that could put even the most ardent conspiracy theorists (I’m thinking of Jade Helm, for example) to shame.

The only statement in Dana’s entire spiel that even remotely aligns with the truth is when she says early on that Obama is considering using Executive Orders to expand government regulation over guns.  In fact, the Kenyan has made it clear that he is looking at options to close some loopholes which, under current gun laws, let individuals transfer large quantities of guns without undergoing NICS-background checks.  And what this would amount to is making a clear distinction between the gun owner who buys, sells or transfers guns from time to time because he’s a hobbyist and he just enjoys fooling around with guns, as opposed to the guy who brings 50 ‘personally-owned’ handguns into a gun show, sells these guns and then restocks his inventory to sell more guns for profit at the next show.  I’m not saying that a gun transferred without a NICS-background check is necessarily going to wind up in the ‘wrong hands.’  But you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that someone who can’t pass a background check today still won’tencounter any great difficulty if he wants to get his hands on a gun.

So here’s how Dana puts it: “You see, the President could use his pen to require that even the simplest transfer of a firearm between family members, like if my husband handed a rifle to his oldest son, be treated in accordance with FFL requirements.” She then goes on to paint a frightening picture of the ATF coming into the home of every gun owner, kind of a throwback to Wayne-o’s calling the ATF ‘jack-booted thugs,’ in a fundraising letter sent to the membership in 1995.

This extraordinary mangling of gun law, you should know, comes out of the mouth of someone who claims to have written a book about guns and Constitutional law.  But the fact is that the entire FFL system, as defined by GCA68, has nothing to do with personal transfers at all.  Dana obviously doesn’t know the difference between personal transfers on the one hand and business transactions on the other.  But why should she care? Do you honestly believe that anyone who takes her rubbish seriously is interested in an evidence-based discussion about guns?

Here’s A New Approach To Gun Violence: Get Rid Of The Second Amendment.

November 17, 2015

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If you want to prove you’re a real gun nut, the way to do it is to refer to yourself as a “Second Amendment absolutist.”  Now in fact that phrase has no real meaning at all, at least not in any legal sense, but it’s a way of identifying with the group that went nuts at the 2000 NRA meeting when the words ‘not from my cold, dead hands’ were intoned by then-NRA President Charlton Heston, whose movie career was just about over except for a bit part in Bowling for Columbine where Michael Moore tried, unsuccessfully, to pester him to death.

As far as I can figure out, to be a Second Amendment absolutist means that government cannot pass any law that would keep American citizens from getting their hands on guns.  Which means bye-bye background checks, bye-bye permit-to-purchase requirements, bye-bye waiting periods and, most of all, bye-bye to any restrictions on walking around with a gun.  It also goes without saying that there wouldn’t be any attempts to restrict the types of guns.  Well, maybe we’d let the government continue to regulate full-auto guns, if only because these items fall into the category of military, rather than civilian small arms. Otherwise, if you can pull the trigger and the gun goes bang only once, you can own and carry anything that you want.

heston               What the gun nuts really want is a legal system which, when it comes to small arms, really doesn’t operate at all.  Which is why I find a new effort to abolish the 2nd Amendment a very interesting response to the absolutist point of view. Because while the absolutists want the amendment ignored, the abolitionists want it to disappear which, to all intents and purposes, amounts to the same thing.  The difference, of course, and the difference is crucial, is that the absolutists want limitless Constitutional protection for their gun-nuttery; the abolitionists know that getting rid of the 2nd Amendment will go a long way towards getting rid of the guns.

Ironically, this was somewhat the state of affairs after the SCOTUS handed down its previous 2nd Amendment decision known as United States vs. Miller in 1939.  In this case, which involved transporting a sawed-off shotgun across state lines, the Court held exactly the opposite from the way it ruled in 2008, namely, that the Constitution did not protect the private ownership of guns. But interestingly, for at least fifty years following Miller, there was little, if any legislative activity involving gun ownership, and even the landmark GCA68 law which got the Feds into gun regulation big-time, didn’t really touch on Constitutional issues at all.  It wasn’t until the Clinton Administration passed two gun laws (Brady and Assault Weapons) in 1994 that arguments over the 2nd Amendment began to heat up, leading eventually to the 2008 decision – a history that is covered thoroughly by Adam Winkler in his well-written book.

The reason I am so taken with this new effort to abolish the 2nd Amendment is that the gun-control community has always been somewhat ambivalent about the statute and, if anything, has found it necessary to defend the amendment from a liberal point of view.  In fact, the debate that led up to the 2008 decision was inaugurated by a pro-2nd Amendment article written by a liberal legal scholar, Sandy Levinson. His 1989 article, “The Embarrassing Second Amendment,” called upon liberal legal circles to support the amendment because, like free speech supporters who argued in favor of the Klan, the Constitution protected the bad along with the good.

Ever since Levinson, liberals have fallen over themselves to proclaim their devotion to the 2nd Amendment while, at the same time, invariably calling for more regulation of guns.  But I don’t see how the constitutionality of gun ownership has anything to do with the 100,000 people injured and killed each year with guns.  Sorry, but the kids and teachers in Sandy Hook would be alive today if Adam Lanza had to leave his gun ‘rights’ at the front door.

Huckabee Opens His Mouth And Says The Dumbest Thing That Anyone Has Said About Guns.

November 16, 2015

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Having lost ground on their patented niche issues like abortion and gay rights, the 2016 version of the Republican Presidential cavalcade has decided that defending the 2nd Amendment will play well with the ‘base’ if only because liberals are usually considered to be anti-gun.  The gun ‘issue’ was first injected into the campaign by Trump-o, who claimed that an armed citizen could have stopped the murder of two television journalists in Virginia, a terribly ugly incident that was caught on video and tv.  Since then, if you’re running for President as a Republican, you can’t make a public speech without making some reference to supporting the 2nd Amendment, even if what you say has little to do with the facts.

And the 2nd Amendment comment that is least aligned with the facts popped out of the mouth of Mike Huckabee during an interview on a right-wing video channel Newsmax, during which he called for gun dealers to refuse to follow any new Executive Order issued by 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue because “the more we surrender the Constitution, the more Obama keeps his power growing.”  And since we all know that Obama’s real plan is to convert America into a radical, Islamic state, the more we need to vigilantly guard our Constitutional freedoms, in particular the freedom to own guns.

huckabeeActually, the stupidity started with the show host Steve Malzberg, who asked Huckabee to comment on a story which said that Obama was going to issue an Executive Order “to require gun shop owners to conduct background checks.”  To which Huckabee replied, “There should certainly be an absolute, unapologetic – just complete ignoring of such an order by those gun-shop owners, because the President can’t make law.” I happen to own a gun shop, and if the President issues an Executive Order which in any way changes the ATF regulations under which I operate, either I follow the new regs or I can close my shop down.  But let’s first get back to what Malzberg actually said.

Malzberg’s statement about what Obama was planning to do through Executive Order had absolutely nothing to do with what Obama has been saying at all.  Federally-licensed gun dealers operating in their places of business (duh, that’s what a gun shop happens to be) have been required to run NICS-background checks on all over-the-counter gun transfers since the Brady bill went into effect in 1998.  What Obama has been talking about is the fact that gun owners often sell numerous guns either at shows, or on the internet, or face-to-face, and these activities should be more closely regulated because here is the point at which guns get into the ‘wrong hands.’  Now I happen to think that the whole issue of the ‘underground’ gun market is somewhat over-stated, but since, by definition, criminals can’t pass background checks, we have to assume that whenever a gun passes from one person to another without a background check, that such a gun could wind up in criminal hands.  Hence, the possible attempt by Obama to make it at least somewhat more difficult for some folks to willy-nilly sell guns to whomever shows up at their gun show table or responds to their internet ad with cash in hand.

Malzberg’s description of the Obama Executive Order strategy has absolutely nothing to do with what Obama may or may not have in mind. Huckabee then took Malzberg’s totally incorrect statement, ran it up the flagpole, and gave a response that was both incorrect and dumb. It might not rank up there next to Rick Perry’s call for secession at a Tea Party rally in 2009,  but it’s cut from the same stupid, pandering piece of cloth.

I’m beginning to think that the Republican Presidential candidates might be misjudging the gun-owning population on whom they evidently need to depend.  Because no matter what Huckabee or Trump says, the average person just can’t be that dumb.

When It Comes To Guns, Trump-o Is Either Lying, Or Dumb, Or Both.

November 15, 2015

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It only took The Donald a couple of hours to figure out how to use the Paris craziness to once again demonstrate that if there’s something worth saying in a totally outrageous way, he’ll figure it out.  And while the other Republican Presidential candidates initially kept to themselves about what happened in the City of Light, leave it to Trump to jump onto Twitter and let fly with what we now expect from him, namely, a comment that is obscenely stupid or totally false, or both.

In this case, along with making some statements about Syrian refugees that could have easily tumbled out of the mouth of the fascist politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, we were then treated to what has become the standard Trump-ism for dealing with all the world’s problems, namely, giving everyone a gun.  Here’s how he ‘analyzed’ the problem, in Paris:  “If they had guns, if our people were allowed to carry, it would have been a much different situation.

And to make sure that nobody would fail to make the connection between everything that’s wrong in the world and the Kenyan-born occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Trump went on to say, “You look at certain cities that have the highest violence with guns and shootings and killings – Chicago is an example, toughest gun laws in the United States.”

trump2 When you stop to think about it, however, why should we condemn Trump for reminding us about the dangers of gun-free zones, when the NRA has been saying the same thing for years?  Isn’t this what Wayne-o said one week after Sandy Hook? Isn’t this what red-meat noisemakers like Breitbart say every chance they get?  In fact, it appears that the tweet put out there by Trump-o was actually a replay of what he tweeted back in January after the Charlie Hebdo attack.  One way or another, the phrase ‘gun-free zone’ has become a standard part of the American political lexicon and Trump-o can’t be blamed just because he gives it yet another digital whirl.

On the other hand, if Trump is going to talk about the negative results of gun control in the city whose current residents include the President of the United States, sooner or later someone from the media might actually try to earn a day’s salary by asking him about gun-control efforts in his own city, in this case not his adopted home town, but the place where he was born, which happens to be New York. Because, in fact, New York boasts the country’s toughest gun-control statute known as the Sullivan Act, which went into effect before World War I. And the result of this law is that The Big Apple is, to all intents and purposes, a totally gun-free zone.  If you’re willing to plunk down $434.95 and wait six months, you might be allowed to keep an unloaded gun in your home, but as for concealed-carry, unless you’re Donald Trump, fuggedabout it, which means, don’t waste your time.

Now it just so happens that this gun-free zone containing 8 million people has a gun-homicide rate of 2.2 per 100,000 residents, which makes it far and away the safest city –  in terms of gun violence -in the entire United States. Chicago’s gun homicide rate is 4 times higher, Los Angeles comes in at 3.52. And the neighborhood where Trump-o himself lives has not seen a single gun homicide or any kind of homicide for the last several years.  And don’t think for one second that there aren’t plenty of opportunities for the bad guys to bring guns into New York; the city of Newark right across the harbor just recorded its 44th gun homicide in 2015 which works out to an annual rate of nearly 16.

Want to understand the connection between gun-free zones and gun violence?  It’s about the same as the connection between the crime rate in New York City and the gun that Trump claims he maybe carries around all or maybe some of the time.

Hey Mr. President, If You Want To Curb The Underground Gun Market, Here’s A Couple Of Ideas.

November 13, 2015

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A few days ago, Everytown published a detailed and serious research report with recommendations to President Obama who wants to issue an Executive Order curtailing private gun sales by defining gun dealers in more realistic ways.  Until now, the definition of a gun dealer makes it quite easy for anyone to transfer lots of guns without holding a dealer’s license, hence, such transfers fall outside the regulatory system controlled by the ATF. By defining more realistically what really constitutes being in the business of selling guns, the intention is to close a major loophole which now exists both in face-to-face and internet sales.

There would be no need for such executive action if every gun transfer required a NICS background check and a Form 4473. But the possibility that such a law would be passed is a faint hope at best, hence Obama’s willingness to consider curbing some unlicensed sales by expanding the definition of gun dealer, hence the report by Everytown which follows a similar set of recommendations put forth by the Center for American Progress last month.

This report is a solid and convincing piece of work.  But the problem with recommending a more stringent definition of ‘gun dealer’ is that it will only make a difference if the regulatory environment in which all dealers have to operate is managed with aggressiveness and dedication by a regulatory agency – the ATF – which has shown a notable lack of diligent performance in the past.

But if the President is really serious about curbing the underground gun market as a way of keeping guns out of the wrong hands, I would like to make two very simple proposals that I believe would profoundly change the regulatory landscape without requiring the ATF to get off their collective rear ends and do anything at all.

First and most important, the ATF itself could simply issue a directive requiring all federally-licensed dealers to record acquisitions and dispositions of their firearm inventory in an online spreadsheet program such as Excel.  The ATF actually suggests that dealers follow this practice, because it makes it easier for them to conduct an inspection when they visit a store.  But it’s not required, although there’s nothing in the current regs that would prevent such an order from being carried out.  What this would allow the ATF to do is drop the nonsense they have been peddling for years about how they are ‘handcuffed’ from learning more about how guns move from legal to illegal hands because they can only trace up to the first sale.

everytown logo             That’s simply not true and it’s not true because the ATF has total authority to examine every notation in the Acquisition & Disposition book, whether it represents the first sale or the subsequent sale of a gun which a purchaser traded in or otherwise returned to the shop.  The average dealer sells 30-40% used guns; which means by definition there are multiple entries for that gun in his A&D book or the A&D of another dealer close by.  And since when was the ATF required only to send a trace request to the dealer who first sold the gun?  There is no such requirement, but in the absence of same, what the hell, make it up.

The President could also require that every law enforcement agency report lost or stolen guns to the ATF.  He issued such an Order after Sandy Hook, but it only applied to federal agencies when, in fact, just about every stolen or missing gun is reported by its owner to the local police.  The national missing/stolen list which the ATF claims is a valuable tool in the fight against crime is a joke, but it could make a difference if it was brought up to speed and combined with trace data which really showed who was the last person to legally buy a certain gun.

I don’t have any special or non-special entrée to the Oval Office.  Here’s hoping that someone better connected than me might pass these recommendations along.

Is The NRA America’s Oldest Civil Rights Organization? Not By A Long Shot.

November 12, 2015

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Now that Colion Noir, or whatever his name is has spiked my Huffington column views by denouncing me as a not-so-closet racist and as someone who knows nothing about guns, I think it’s time to finally set the record straight as to why I find his video arcade to be so appallingly amateurish, silly and without serious content of any kind.  Because behind his verbal pitter-patter and the prancing around in his endless collection of baseball caps, what we have is an effort to promote the ‘gun culture’ as some kind of uniquely American lifestyle that deserves our interest, attention and support.

But what Colion is really supporting is nothing more than the continued marketing campaign of the gun industry to convince us that the real enemy is the ‘mainstream,’ liberal media who wants nothing other than to take away all the guns.  And this is particularly serious for our man Colion, who sees himself as the last line of defense against people like me and my “pathetic attempt to manipulate Black people away from the gun rights issue.”

noir           But what exactly does Colion mean when he talks about ‘gun rights?’  What he and the NRA want you to think is that gun-grabbing liberals (like me) are really devils in disguise, because we pretend to be in favor of equal rights when, in fact, we are endlessly trying to strip Black folks of their most precious and hard-won right, namely, the right to defend themselves with a gun.

This nonsense about how the so-called ‘tradition’ of African-Americans arming themselves for self-defense is part of the bigger pile of historical untruthfulness that the NRA endlessly promotes every time it proclaims itself to be ‘America’s oldest civil rights organization.’  The NRA was founded in 1871, and had it actually been concerned with civil rights, perhaps the African-American community wouldn’t have had to wait until a century following the end of the Civil War to gain the same legal and social equality that the White citizens of this country enjoyed once the Constitution was ratified in 1788.

In fact there was a tradition of Black armed, self-defense which grew up in the decades following the Civil War.  And when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., began preaching the strategy of non-violence, he found himself in disagreement with other Black leaders, like Robert Williams, who publicly made no bones about the fact that they wanted and needed access to guns. But let’s make one thing very clear: civil rights activists like Williams didn’t want guns to protect themselves against crime.  They needed guns to protect themselves against organized, state violence in the form of racist sheriffs and the KKK.  To Southern civil rights activists, Black and White, terrorism wasn’t something which existed in the Middle East.  It was home-grown, violently racist and bent on keeping Blacks ‘in their place.’

There is simply no relationship, historical or otherwise, between the century-long struggle for civil rights in this country and the cynical attempt by the gun industry to pretend that their promotion of the 2nd Amendment is an equivalent effort to strengthen Constitutional rights.  I happened to be living in Chicago in 1969 and working on the city’s West Side when a unit of the Chicago Police Department mounted a machine gun on the roof of a backyard garage, opened fire, and assassinated the local leader of the Black Panthers – Fred Hampton – as he lay sleeping in his bed.  I was at the scene shortly after the murder took place, the bedroom wall sustained more than 200 rounds of high-power ammunition from which Freddie had absolutely no chance to escape.

The Panthers got their start in California and it was their public display of guns which resulted in a gun-control law signed by a Governor named Ron.  But the Panthers didn’t arm themselves for protection against ‘thugs.’  And if Colion wants to pretend that he’s fighting for the ‘rights’ of minorities by prancing around for the NRA, what you’re seeing is a modern version of the minstrel show.

 

 

There’s A Petition Out There You Really Should Sign.

November 10, 2015

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There’s a new petition in town that deserves your support.  It’s a project of the group called Doctors For America, whose founders back in 2008 included a guy named Vivek Murthy whom you might remember had some initial difficulties becoming Surgeon General because of another guy named Rand Paul. I’m playing a little tongue-in-cheek here because I can’t remember another politician who made as much of a jerk out of himself as Rand Paul did by temporarily blocking Murthy’s nomination because Murthy didn’t appreciate the virtues and benefits of guns.  After all, as a physician, why should Murthy or anyone else be concerned about 100,000 gun injuries and deaths every year? Oh hell, messed it up again; we know that it’s people who kill people, right?  When they use a gun to kill someone else it must have been to stop a crime.

cdc                Anyway, to return to reality, the DFA petition asks Congress to restore funding of gun research by the CDC.  Incidentally, for anyone who’s interested in numbers, what we are talking about is a whopping $3 million or less each year which is probably about what Congress spends on replacing worn-out parking meters in downtown DC.  In a funny way I suspect that one of the reasons the funding ban continues is precisely because it represents a budgetary item which hardly anyone can see, and therefore doesn’t attract enough attention to turn its annual defunding into a political fight.

When the NRA and its puppet Congressman Jay Dickey first pushed through the ban, the rationale they used was that the CDC was supporting not gun research per se, but gun-control advocacy which was not a proper way to use taxpayer’s funds.  Actually, it wasn’t the CDC that was doing the advocacy; rather, it was the GVP community that was utilizing the results of CDC-funded research to support its point of view.  Which shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone since what CDC-funded scholars were discovering was a rather remarkable state of affairs, namely, that guns were actually lethal weapons, a finding which came as a complete surprise to the NRA!

You have to understand something about the gun nuts who work at Waples Mill Road in Fairfax, VA.  Some of them, perhaps a majority of them actually believe that there’s no risk from guns.  Or to put it more exactly, if there is some kind of risk, it’s clearly outweighed by the benefits of owning a gun. Now when I joined the NRA back in 1955, owning a gun usually meant a rifle or shotgun which was used for hunting if you lived out in the country or for some kind of sport shooting if you lived closer to town. My father had one friend who owned a handgun, but it was a slightly-rusted Colt pistol that he brought back from World War II. But this began changing in the 1980s when hunting and sport shooting began to disappear and the gun industry recalibrated its products by launching an all-out campaign to sell handguns as a necessary response to crime.  The research that supported the notion that guns make us safe was so shabby that it would never have been published had it been funded by the CDC.

Over the nearly twenty years since the CDC ban went into effect, private funding sources have continued to support gun research and the evidence continues to mount that guns represent a risk that far outweighs the benefits of ownership, whether the gun industry agrees or not.  But most people who support the efforts of the GVP community really don’t need more evidence to convince them of what they already know.  Because what they know is that when you pick up a loaded gun and pull the trigger, someone in the way of that bullet is going to get badly hurt. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a good guy or a bad guy; gun violence is a national shame that can’t be ignored.  Sign the petition. Sign it now.

Are We Safe By Locking Up Or Locking Away The Guns? I’m Not So Sure.

November 9, 2015

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Every week, if not more frequently, the media carries yet another story about a young kid who kills himself or someone else, often a parent, with a gun.  And I’m not talking ‘young kids’ as in twelve year olds.  I’m talking like young kids who have not yet reached the age of five.

Last year, a few days after Chsristmas, a two-year old got into his mother’s pocketbook while she was shopping in a Walmart, yanked out her Smith & Wesson pistol that she was carrying for self-defense, pulled the trigger and shot her dead. A month later in New Mexico the victims were a father and mother whose three-year-old son shot them both in a motel.  It’s really gruesome when this kind of shooting takes place but it seems to happen all the time.

gun safe                When it comes to this kind of gun violence, everyone in the gun debate appears to be on the same side, at least up to a point. The GVP community wants mandatory CAP laws extended to every state; the gun gang is opposed to any mandatory legal fix, but never lets a day go by without reminding us that they have distributed more than 36 million locks and kits that teach young shooters how to be safe around guns.  Is there a single medical organization or pro-gun group that hasn’t come out one way or the other in favor of locking up or locking away the guns?

With all due respect to the honest energies and safety concerns on both sides of the gun debate, I happen to think that the ‘lock ‘em up, lock ‘em away’ approach to gun safety is a little bit beside the point.  Or to put it another way, to promote gun safety with trigger locks and safe storage is kind of like using an elephant to swat a flea.  Here are the numbers.  According to the CDC, in 2013 there were 505 unintentional deaths and 16,864 non-fatal injuries involving guns.  Of these totals, 69 kids under the age of 15 were accidentally shot to death, 538 under the age of 15 were injured fooling around with a gun.  If every civilian-owned gun in the United States was locked up or locked every night, and every loaded gun that wasn’t secured was kept away from every kid, the death and injury toll from gun accidents would drop by slightly more than 3 percent! And please, please don’t start with how every human life is sacred and should be spared.  I’m not talking about theology or compassion, I’m talking about whether the policies we adopt for dealing with a medical condition which kills or injures more than 17,000 Americans each year are policies that will yield results.

Know why people accidentally wound or injure themselves or others with a gun each year?  Because we are human beings, and as human beings we are prone to make mistakes, do stupid things, act in careless ways or are just plain dumb.  Want the best example I can find?  Take a look at this video of a cop buying an off-duty gun with which he shot himself in the hand:

Stupid #1: Clerk didn’t check to see if the gun was loaded.

Stupid #2: Cop didn’t check either.

Stupid #3: Cop points gun at someone else.

Stupid #4: Cop sticks his hand in front of the barrel.

Stupid #5: Cop accidentally drops mag and at the same time shoots off the gun.

 

Now go back, watch the video again, and while it’s rolling repeat these words: Pledge, practice, promote firearm safety. Say it a couple of more times while the video rolls again. Know what you just said?  You just said the Glock Firearm Safety Pledge.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve never advocated banning guns and I never will.  But anyone who thinks that with 300 million lethal weapons floating around we are going to prevent 17,000 people from behaving like jerks each and every year doesn’t know anything about guns. Or about jerks.

Docs Versus Glocks And The Docs Now Get A Helping Hand.

November 8, 2015

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Last week a California Congressman, Michael Honda, introduced a bill that, if enacted, would end what has been the nefarious and disturbing strategy adopted by the pro-gun gang to push medicine out of the gun violence debate.  This strategy has three basic dimensions: (1). To define the 100,000 mortalities/morbidities from guns as something other than a public health issue; (2). to prevent public health research into gun violence by defunding relevant research budgets of the CDC; (3). to criminalize and/or otherwise prevent physicians from talking to patients about access to guns.

Don’t think for a second that it’s only a bunch of yahoos and red-neck gun nuts who believe that 100,000 deaths and injuries committed with guns doesn’t constitute a problem for public health.  Last year we were treated to the spectacle of a U.S. Senator who happens to be a physician, if only a self-certified one, blocking the appointment of the Surgeon General because Vivek Murthy had actually stated that guns were a public health threat.  It should be added, incidentally, that this self-same jerk (not Murthy, obviously) claims that if he is elected President, he’ll uphold the “entire Bill of Rights, but specifically our right to bear arms.”  So I guess he’ll support the other nine Amendments but only in general terms.

docs versus glocks                The defunding of CDC research into gun violence was payback by the NRA for the Brady Bill and the ten-year assault weapons ban that were passed by Congress just before the Democrats lost their majorities in both the House and the Senate in the Republican landslide of 1994.  The spending cutoff didn’t end gun research per se, because private foundations and other sources jumped in and provided much-needed support.  But what the research ban accomplished was to send a signal to the medical community, both clinicians and researchers, that gun violence was simply not considered an issue of public concern.  Which made it that much more difficult to advance legislative responses to deaths and injuries from guns.

There are now three states which have passed laws copying more or less the Florida statute that criminalizes the behavior of doctors who talk to patients about guns.  This law, known as Docs Vs. Glocks, is still being kicked around in the Federal courts, but if it is ever declared completely and totally Constitutional, the law will no doubt appear in other gun-rich states as well.  The Florida law, of course, allows clinicians to talk to patients about guns if the physician decides that the patient represents a “clear danger” to himself or someone else.  Of course the only way that a physician can make such a determination about access to guns or access to any life-threatening situation is by having the widest possible latitude to discuss, in privacy, anything that goes on.  But try and explain this to the legislators in the Gunshine State who cynically cast a quick and easy vote reminding their constituents that protecting their 2nd-Amendment rights is more important than protecting their health.

Congressman Honda’s bill seeks to remedy this entire state of affairs.  Called the “Gun Violence Research Act, “ the bill specifically re-inserts language into the Public Health Service Act calling for research into ”the causes, mechanisms, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of injuries, including with respect to gun violence;”  it also authorizes funding of this research through 2020; and most important, it prevents prohibiting a physician or other health provider from asking a patient about guns.

All the bill’s co-sponsors are Democrats, which shouldn’t surprise. But the good news is that we now have an explicit legislative remedy that can be used against the gun gang’s shabby and dangerous efforts to silence medicine about the health risks of guns.  Don’t get me wrong.  We accept many risks in everyday life and if someone wants to accept gun risk for whatever reason, they can do as they please.  But the role of the physician is to reduce harm, and guns are harmful, no matter what anyone says.

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Want To Move Between Two Worlds? Go From The National Cathedral In DC To A Gun Show in PA.

November 7, 2015

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , , , , Leave a comment

This past Tuesday, as I wrote in a previous column, I attended a gun violence forum at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.  The program included appearances by various religious leaders representing different faiths, several elected officials from Congress, representatives of anti-violence, community-based organizations and, unfortunately, several parents of children who lives ended terribly and tragically when a gun went off at the wrong time and in the wrong place.  Following the program, I sat at a table, spoke with many who had been in the audience and watched as hundreds of people concerned about gun violence walked by.

Today I am sitting at a gun show in Bloomsburg, PA, also watching hundreds of people walk by.  I have a dealer friend who has closed his retail shop this year and is doing the gun show circuit with a line of cleaning products that he believes are the next best thing to gluten-free food except that, as he admits, he may need to ‘tweak’ his marketing plan a bit in order to move ahead.  A few people walking past his table at the show actually say ‘hello’ or pick up and then just as quickly put down his little cleaning kit complete with a set of ‘indispensable’ tools.  But most of the folks walk right past his table because the guy at the next table has a really nice display of guns.

gun show1                So this week I am spending some time with the two populations whose views on guns and gun-related issues will ultimately make or break the way Americans own and use small arms.  One side, the folks I met at the National Cathedral, truly believe that we would be a safer and less violent country if we didn’t have such easy access to guns; the other side just as truly believes that they don’t need any laws at all to tell them how to behave safely with their guns. These different viewpoints would each find unanimous support amongst the two audiences that were present at the National Cathedral or the gun show in Bloomsburg, PA. But that’s hardly the only contrast between the two crowds.

The folks who walked past my table at the National Cathedral were, first of all, a completely racially and gender-wise diverse lot.  They were also mostly professionals and well-educated, the ‘uniforms’ being a mixture of LL Bean, corporate casual and an occasional outfit featured on Pinterest.  Want to know what passes for designer clothes at the gun show?  Dickie’s Clothing is all over the place, Woolrich is a step up, go for some real style with Pendleton, or since it’s a gun show, pull out the 5.11 gear and whiskey-tango-foxtrot, you’re good to go.  As for race and gender, there are plenty of snot-nosed kids tugging at Mom’s shoulder to ‘hurry up and let’s go to the mall,’ and plenty of Moms who are just as equally tugging on Dad’s shoulder to hurry up and let’s go to the mall.  Gun shows are a man’s world and the man is almost always white.

The point is that the two sides in the gun debate are more different than any two populations that we could identify as having different viewpoints on any public policy issue at all.  When it comes to gun violence, incidentally, what’s funny is that we all seem able to discuss in reasonable tones whether as a country we need to have a ready supply of really big weapons – planes, tanks, nukes – to make the world a safer place.  It’s when we get down to safety on our own street corners with the little weapons that rhetorical ugliness and angry epithets tend to shape the debate.

Somehow over the last twenty years the reaction to people getting killed or injured with guns has turned ugly, raucous and mean.  But hasn’t the discussion of all policy issues become more nasty and abrasive since a certain Kenyan signed a lease at for an apartment in the People’s House?

 

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