Let’s Go To A Gun Show.
October 28, 2019
Blogs gun collectors, gun sales, gun shows 2 Comments
Yesterday I went to the gun show that is held every three months at a location about 20 miles from where I live. The show has been running for at least twenty-five years and I see the same vendors and visitors year after year. It’s a medium-sized show as gun shows go, maybe 150 vendors selling all kinds of guns and gun-related stuff, maybe 300 – 400 folks wandering around at any one time. The most popular location, of course, was the deli which features the usual hot dogs and fries, there was also a Dunkin’ Donuts kiosk where a cup of coffee ran three bucks.
I’m not saying that I conducted any kind of scientific survey, but it’s not that difficult to get a pretty good read on who goes to a gun shows these days. The people walking up and down the aisles were almost all older White men, probably in their 60’s and above. The men outnumbered the women by at least ten to one – so much for all the talk about how women are ‘getting into’ guns. Did I see any Brothers wandering around even though the show’s location is less than ten minutes from a medium-sized city which is at least fifty percent non-White? No.
As for the people who were sitting behind the vendor tables, most of them were as old or older than the folks who came to the show to look at guns. Of the 150 vendors, probably about one-third were selling guns but only a handful were dealers with real gun shops, the rest were collectors who are licensed as dealers but don’t actually run a real business of any kind. It’s easy to spot the collectors as opposed to the real dealers, because the collectors display guns that are at least a hundred years old. A 1903 Springfield rifle, for example, may have been manufactured prior to 1919, and I saw at least 30 of these World War I vintage guns on vendor tables here and there.
Of the 100 or so vendors who weren’t selling guns, about half of them sold optics, holsters or knives, the other half were selling all kinds of junk including jewelry, military-surplus clothing, books, targets and other kinds of crap. I bought a nice, handmade leather holster for my Glock 17; I also got into a lively discussion with a guy who knew ‘for a fact’ that every Democratic Presidential candidate, all 20 of them, had received large payments from some oligarch in the Ukraine.
Ten years ago gun shows always had a couple of vendors selling military memorabilia, in particular World War II medals, uniforms and helmets, including stuff allegedly worn by Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima or the Nazi SS. Those items have disappeared from the gun show circuit, not because of political correctness, but because nobody remembers or even knows anything about a war which ended more than 70 years ago.
And yes, the NRA was at the show because America’s ‘first civil rights organization’ usually has a booth at every gun show. For all the talk about how the NRA is going down the tubes and Wayne-o is such a big crook, the NRA rep seemed to be having a good time handing out applications and a list of upcoming NRA events.
One big change: I didn’t see a single vendor selling MAGA hats or t-shirts extolling the virtues of Donald Trump. In fact, for all the talk about how gun owners are the bedrock of the alt-right, the show was decidedly non-political in every respect. If anyone was walking around with a petition calling on Nancy Pelosi to ‘open up’ the impeachment process, he was keeping very much out of sight.
This show takes place three miles away from an inner-city neighborhood where shootings are a daily part of life. Perhaps someone can explain to me how closing down this show would do anything to reduce gun violence in that nearby neighborhood or anywhere else.
The NRA Might Be Down, But They’re Not Out.
October 25, 2019
Blogs Gun control, NRA, shootings 2 Comments
There was a surprise for me in my mailbox yesterday, namely, the November issue of American Rifleman, which happens to be the premier publication of the NRA. The reason I was surprised was that back in April, a detailed story by Mike Spies that was carried in The New Yorker and The Trace provoked an avalanche of criticism about America’s ‘first civil rights organization’ which made it appear that the pro-gun group was headed for a quick demise.
Not only did the NRA find itself being attacked for shabby bookkeeping, sweetheart business dealings and all kinds of other nefarious deeds, but for the first time in more than 40 years, an attempt was made to jettison the leadership and bring in an entirely new management group. The effort collapsed when it turned out that the chief promoter of this coup d’etat, Oliver North, was himself profiting from an inside deal with the NRA‘s advertising agency which led to the NRA giving the boot both to North and to the advertising agency as well.
Despite this reprieve, the news for the NRA kept getting worse and worse, with simultaneous investigations being carried out by the New York State Attorney General (the NRA is incorporated in New York as a not-for-profit corporation) along with an investigation by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) about the alleged connections between the NRA and Maria Butina, the so-called Russian ‘spy.’ The latter effort resulted Wyden’s report which didn’t show any unlawful NRA activity at all; the former investigation will shlep on until even the cows in all those upstate New York counties come home.
What really got things going, however, was that more than 80 people were killed and injured in two mass shootings which occurred in just two days. The shooting in El Paso on August 3 took 22 lives and injured 24 more; the next day a shooting in Dayton resulted in another 10 killed and 27 injured. That’s quite a score.
Whenever there is a mass shooting two things occur: 1). There is an immediate spike in media coverage and public concern about the event; 2). The gun-control narrative to define these shootings invariably finds some way or another to blame the NRA. Either the NRA is guilty of preventing laws that would curb the violence, or the NRA promotes armed, self-defense which is just another way to spread the idea that guns are good, gun-grabbers are bad.
After all the sturm und drang about guns after those mass shootings, the whole issue of gun control has once again gone back to where it always sits; namely, nobody really cares about it at all. The keywords ‘gun violence’ spiked to four times the usual level of Google searches during the week of August 4 -10; it’s now back to just about the lowest level recorded this year. As for the Presidential candidates, they went through their usual talking-points about guns during their last debate, but the fact that gun control is no longer a toxic issue for Democrats is old news.
On the other hand, getting back to my beloved American Rifleman, the issue contains the usual mélange of reviews of new guns and shooting products and a great article on the M1903-A1 Springfield that was our sniper rifle in World War II. But the issue also contains a lengthy op-ed by Wayne-o, which can be seen on the NRA website, a commentary about the ‘future of the NRA.”
Compared to the NRA’s messaging over the last few years, Wayne-o’s commentary is actually pretty tame stuff. Gone is the bombast of video performers like Colion Noir, gone is the racially-tinged stupidities of Dana Loesch, gone is the attempt to make the NRA a leading voice for the alt-right. If anything, the tone and content of Wayne-o’s spiel reminds me of what I heard when I went to NRA shows in 1980 and 1981.
This change in NRA communication strategy actually seems to be working quite well. From April through June the NRA website registered around 500,000 visits each month. The total for September was 1,750,000 – that’s right, more than three times as many visits as when things were going to Hell.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of the NRA‘s death may be greatly exaggerated.
Do More Guns Really Mean More Gun Violence?
October 21, 2019
Blogs gun laws, Gun violence, guns 8 Comments
Over the least quarter-century, the debate about guns and gun violence has coalesced into two camps. One camp, let’s call it the ‘guns are good’ (GAG) camp, says that guns protect us from violence and crime. The other camp, let’s call it the ‘guns are bad’ (GAB) camp, says that guns cause more violence and crime. The GAG has been led by our friend John Lott. The GAB has been led by our friend David Hemenway. Today’s column will examine the argument made by the GAB.
In multiple articles plus a well-known and oft-cited book, Hemenway claims that the rate of violent crime is no different between the U.S. and other ‘advanced’ nation-states. On the other hand, the U.S. has a much higher rate of fatal, violent crime, a difference caused by the private ownership of some 300 million guns.
Hemenway and other public-health researchers refer to their approach as creating an ‘epidemiology’ of gun violence; i.e., figuring out where (geographically) and when (numerically) this particular form of injury occurs. Unfortunately, the comparison he makes between the U.S. and other ‘advanced’ countries is wrong on both counts.
If Hemenway and his public health cohorts actually believe that comparing any health event in a country of 320 million people with another country that holds one-tenth that population or less gives us any insights into how to deal with that particular health problem, then all I can say is that you can use numbers to prove anything you want. Of the 34 countries currently in the OECD, ten have a total population of less than 30 million. Does anyone really believe that we can come up with a valid explanation about anything if we compare what happens in the U.S. to what goes on, for example, in Luxembourg, whose total population is .001 percent of ours?
Luxembourg covers an area of 998 square miles, which happens to be one-fifth the size of Connecticut. If you stuck Luxembourg into Montana, it would be a tiny speck. And yet Hemenway and other GAB researchers want us to believe that a cross-national comparison between the United States and a country like Luxembourg should be the basis on which we develop ‘reasonable’ national gun laws, right?
The GAB argument breaks down even further when we forget cross-national comparisons and just look at the rate of violent crime within the United States. According to the FBI-UCR, the U.S. violent crime rate in 2017 was 394 per 100K. But this number, particularly the more than 17,000 homicides which contribute 1.3% of the crimes to the overall number of violent crimes, is also rather meaningless when discussed in global terms.
In fact, on a regional basis, the homicide rate of 5.3 breaks down like this: Northeast – 3.5; Midwest – 5.7; South – 6.4; West – 4.5. Taken together, the 15 Southern states represent almost half the total homicides of the country as a whole. The Northeast, on the other hand, represents just 11% of all homicides, although the total regional population is just about half the number of people living in the South.
To compare the overall rate of gun violence in the U.S. to other countries is basically a false comparison precisely because the murder rates in different parts of our country vary to such an extreme degree. If Hemenway and his public health research colleagues want to pretend they are creating an ‘epidemiology’ of gun violence, they should stop talking about a ‘national crisis’ and start looking at what the numbers really say. What the numbers really say is that we have a severe public health problem called ‘gun violence’ which shows up most frequently in the Southern states.
My mail-list includes all the public health researchers who support the GAB idea. If any of them want to reply to this column, I’ll gladly post their words right here. But if there’s one thing which seems to unite virtually the entire community of gun-violence public health researchers, it’s their obsessive desire to avoid any public debate about their own work. So we’ll see what we see.
Josh Montgomery: Staying Stable While Shooting.
October 17, 2019
Blogs armed self-defense, self-defense shooting, shooting Leave a comment
Staying Stable While Shooting
The importance of shooting stability is often overrated – especially the fact that it is linked with the safety of the shooter and not only. The truth is that the two of them are connected. You need to have the right posture in order to increase your shooting accuracy. And the right posture can be achieved through stability. There is a study that analyzes the relationship between the two.
On that note, today, we will introduce you to some handy tips. These tips should help you optimize your stability when shooting. It’s important to become more responsible shooters, especially if you want to safeguard the safety of your family and children.
The Right Shooting Stance
Some people might think that the way in which you stand doesn’t impact the way you shoot. This is not true, though. This is basically the very foundation of shooting. And when you don’t have a steady foundation, the odds are that your shooting performance will be affected, to some extent or another.
It goes without saying that recoil and loud explosions are in no way fun or expected. Not to mention that they could really jeopardize your safety. If we were to get technical, there are three primary types of stances – namely Weaver, Isosceles and Chapman. These represent different variations of leg and arm placement.
When you have the right shooting stance, this will help you stay stable. And most importantly, this will allow you to get better at shooting. The right technique can really make the world of a difference. We can say just the same about picking the right gun. Whether we are talking about lighter and smaller guns for women or big, massive rifles, your shooting stance is an essential element. Make sure you have it right. And if you don’t, it’s never too late to learn a bit more about it.
The Importance of Handgun Grip
The next thing on the list is definitely the handgun grip. When you hold a gun, you need to be serious about it. Just as you would be about holding your future or your safety, so to speak. That doesn’t mean you should grip the handgun as hard as you can since this could backfire as well. You need to feel confident whenever you take the gun in your hand. And this has to do with a firm, secure grip.
When you have a firm handgun grip, this will diminish the movement of your non-trigger-fingers. This is, essentially a good thing. Not to mention that the manner in which you hold your gun will impact your accuracy. Ideally, the distance between your trigger finger and your thumb should be high. In this way, the grip will contain the recoil of the slide that moves back and forth.
Usually, it’s advisable to keep your support hand really high on the back of the gun. You might even attempt to get some of your hand behind the grip if that’s a possibility. Once you do that, you can even keep the thumbs forward – depending on the size of your hands. Or you can keep the thumbs high. This will keep your wrists in place. Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that your grip also has to do with your individual hand and the size of your finger – of course.
Now, let’s say your hands are smaller, which would make your fingers a bit shorter. In this case, your thumbs will imminently be pointed more upright. This only means that you should keep experimenting, testing different techniques and pinpointing what works best to boost your stability.
Keep Your Elbows Bent
Did you ever think that the way in which you keep your elbows has to do with your shooting stability? This should go without saying.
Most people assume that they enjoy more control over the handgun if they keep their elbows locked, so to speak. But this is rarely the case. Usually, you get more control and stability by keeping your elbows a bit bent. Why would you do that? There are several ways in which we could explain this.
For one thing, this will help your elbows to act as natural shock absorbers. Therefore, you will control the recoil better. Another aspect worth noting would be that this determines you to keep your wrists in place so that you maintain the sights aligned with your eyes. Meanwhile, a slight bend in the elbows will allow you to deter driving the first shot low whenever you’re in a hurry to shoot.
You might even keep your elbows a bit up. This will create inward crushing pressure.
Take Your Time
A common mistake most people do is lifting the finger off immediately after every shot and looking at the target. The truth is that the target won’t run anywhere. It will still be there a few seconds later, which only means you should take your time. When you take off the finger too quickly, the likelihood of firing too fast and jerking the trigger is higher. Another risk that comes with the territory would be adding excess movement to the gun.
Not to mention that you’ll make your life more difficult when you’ll shoot the next fire. This is where proper trigger reset can make the world of a difference. This can maintain the trigger all the way at the end. In addition to that, this will release the trigger at the right time – when you’ll feel the click. It’s a good thing not to rush yourself, especially if you’re just starting out. Even when it comes to experienced shooters, this doesn’t make it appropriate to do things in a rushed way, as this could impair your safety.
The Bottom Line
Shooting is not as simple as it may seem. And if you’re concerned about the importance of safety when shooting, these tips should come in handy. The bottom line is that you won’t become a pro in a matter of days. These things take time, and you should be patient with yourself. You’ll get there before you know it with perseverance and determination.
Should We Ban Assault Rifles?
October 16, 2019
Blogs assault rifles, gun buybacks, gun injuries 9 Comments
I normally don’t watch the Democratic debates because it’s still too early in the primary season and no matter who ends up with the nomination I’m going to vote blue every, single time. You see, I have this congenital physical ailment which when I get into a voting booth and reach for the Republican lever, my arm gets paralyzed and I can’t vote. I’m a bone fide gun nut and a yellow-dog Democrat and I’m proud of both.
So I didn’t watch the debate last night but I did happen to see commentaries about the exchange between Buttigieg and Beto over Beto’s call for a mandatory buyback of AR-15’s. As I understand it, the media has decided that the Democrats are split between a ‘middle’ led by Joe and a ‘radical’ led maybe by Bernie, maybe by Warren, maybe by Ocasio, blah, blah, blah and blah. And the media has further decided that Buttigieg is somewhere in the middle while Beto is somewhere on the extreme. And what the media has decided is the acid test for where these two guys perch is over the issue of getting rid of AR-15’s.
Now who would have ever thought that any kind of gun issue would be used to define the basic stance of the candidate who wants to lead the blue ticket in the national election next year? I can see defining the candidates on something like universal health care, or whether or not to ‘tax the rich,’ or some other issue which hits in the middle of the must-do zone. But guns?
Anyway, the argument between Buttigieg and Beto erupted because the kid from Texas has opted for a mandatory buyback of assault rifles, while Buttigieg wants to try and remain somehow relevant to Gun-nut Nation by saying that we can ask but shouldn’t require that gun owners turn over those lethal guns. And the way that Buttigieg is framing the argument is to challenge Beto to explain exactly how he is going to force assault-rifle owners to turn over their guns.
Beto doesn’t yet have a plan to invoke the coercive authority of the government to get rid of all those black guns, but why should he be made to come clean on this issue when Liz Warren has promised to reduce gun violence by 80 percent without yet producing any plan at all? And let me tell you something about Lizzie; she produces position papers on just about everything under the sun. But so far we still don’t know how 120,000 fatal and non-fatal gun injuries each year will be cut down to 20,000 or less. So why should we expect Beto to explain how the government will pick up and throw out some crummy, semi-automatic guns?
If this is the best that Buttigieg can do to vault himself ahead of Beto in the polls, I think he should go back to South Bend and figure out to keep the city parks neat and clean. That’s what municipal mayors are paid to do – collect the garbage, sweep the streets, make sure that everyone scoops up their doggie doo-doo, essential city services like that. If someone asked me to go out and campaign for Buttigieg after he challenged Beto on something as stupid as whether an assault weapon buyback should be mandatory or not, to quote my old friend Jimmy Breslin, rather I should go lay brick.
Mandating or not mandating a buyback of assault rifles isn’t going to make any great difference in how we deal with the violence caused by guns. What a buyback does, mandated or not, is to keep the issue of gun lethality where it belongs, namely, whether people understand the risks inherent in owning certain kinds of guns.
If you want to own an assault rifle and assume the risk, that’s fine. We all do risky things every day. But anyone who tells you that an AR-15 is just another ‘sporting’ gun is either lying or doesn’t know anything about guns.
Tom Gabor: Gun Violence Is A Violation Of Human Rights
October 15, 2019
Blogs Gun violence, human rights, shootings 8 Comments
With mass shootings this summer at a Walmart in El Paso, a California garlic festival, and in Dayton’s entertainment district, Americans can justifiably ask whether they are safe in any setting. A related question is whether people have the right to be safe in their communities. Do children have the right to attend school without fearing a mass shooting?
Debates over gun policy take place on two major fronts. First, there are the scientific arguments as to whether gun ownership levels in an area, gun carrying, or the presence of guns in the home enhance or detract from public or personal safety. Most of the science in this area indicates that raising levels of gun ownership is detrimental to public safety overall.[i] Certainly, there are instances in which guns are used successfully in self-defense but these cases are outnumbered many times over by those in which guns are used to commit crime, to threaten or intimidate others (including domestic partners), or to commit suicide. Consider an FBI investigation of active shooter incidents. Despite the fact that there are 120 guns for every 100 Americans, just one of 160 of these incidents studied by the Bureau was stopped by an armed civilian.[ii]
The second front on which the gun debate is waged relates to civil rights. This debate has largely been one-sided with gun rights advocates and the gun lobby frequently thwarting the passage of gun laws on the basis that the laws in question violate their Second Amendment rights.
The Second Amendment was interpreted historically by the courts as the right to bear arms within the context of militia service. For example, in United States v. Miller (1939), two defendants who had been prosecuted for failing to register and pay a tax for possessing and carrying a sawed-off shotgun across state lines argued that such requirements under the National Firearms Act violated their Second Amendment rights. The US Supreme Court ultimately ruled that such a weapon had no role in an organized militia and was therefore not protected by the Second Amendment.
Following a decades-long campaign by the National Rifle Association to promote the view that the Second Amendment guaranteed a right to bear arms to individuals outside of militia service—a view characterized by former Chief Justice Warren Burger as the greatest fraud on the American public—the US Supreme Court did rule in the 2008 Heller decision that individuals had the right to own an operable gun in the home for protection. However, writing for the majority in the 5-4 decision, Justice Antonin Scalia—a hunter and a conservative—made it clear that this right was not unlimited and that laws regulating the carrying of firearms, denying gun ownership to felons and the mentally ill, and prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons did not violate the Second Amendment.
The militia view of the Amendment does not recognize the “right to keep and bear arms” as an individual right at all and, hence, is not an impediment to laws that would restrict gun ownership outside of militia service. The Heller decision, too, leaves a great deal of room to regulate guns. In fact, since Heller, an overwhelming majority of Second Amendment challenges to federal, state, and local gun laws have been rejected by the courts.[iii] Still, the NRA’s campaign to sell the narrative that individuals have an absolute right to possess virtually any firearm has altered public opinion and has led to endless debates about how limited or expansive is the right to bear arms.
What gets lost in these debates about gun rights is the vast majority of Americans who are not gun owners or who are otherwise concerned about public safety. What about their rights to feel safe? What about the rights of children who are terrified to go to school? What about the right to speak one’s mind or to enjoy a night out without intimidation by people carrying guns? These are not academic questions as the US has the most armed population in the world. The US is also an outlier, relative to other high-income countries, with regard to the permissiveness of its laws in relation to gun carrying and the ownership of military-style weapons. In addition, with one hundred Americans dying from gunfire and one mass shooting each day, the US is exceptional with regard to its high level of gun mortality. Communities of all sizes are affected and marginalized communities suffer disproportionately.
While the rights-based debate rages on about the meaning and scope of the Second Amendment, the right of the public as a whole to be safe from gun violence has been ignored. The absence of attention to the public’s right to safety is surprising given that the US has signed or ratified a number of human rights conventions that can be applied to gun violence. Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms that “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”[iv] The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states that no person “shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life (Article 6).[v]
The US has also signed the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination; however, African Americans have exceptionally high levels of gun mortality relative to the rest of the population, are disproportionately the victims of police-involved shootings and of vigilante-type shootings enabled by the Stand Your Ground laws passed by half the states. While the US has signed the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the country has also been slow to protect women in the US as they are far more likely to be murdered by gunfire than in other advanced countries. An abuser’s access to guns increases the risk of death to women by five-fold, yet laws generally allow men with a history of violence to get around background checks by purchasing guns on the private market, permit abusive boyfriends to own guns, and fail to require the surrender of guns by those who threaten women. The US has signed but not ratified the Convention of the Rights of the Child. Still, US children and teens are 32 times more likely to die of a gun homicide and 10 times more likely to die of a gun suicide or accident than their peers in the other high-income countries combined.[vi]
The human rights group Amnesty International argues in a 2018 report, In the Line of Fire, that the US has breached its commitments under international human rights law. AI writes: “The USA has failed to implement a comprehensive, uniform and coordinated system of gun safety laws and regulations particularly in light of the large number of firearms in circulation, which perpetuates unrelenting and potentially avoidable violence, leaving individuals susceptible to injury and death from firearms.”[vii]
AI further notes that, as part of the right to life and other human rights, the responsibilities of nations to prevent gun violence requires: 1) restricting access to firearms, especially on the part of those at an elevated risk of misusing them; and 2) implementing violence reduction measures where firearm misuse persists. The human rights group asserts that nations should establish robust regulatory systems, including licensing, registration, restriction of certain weapon types, safe storage, research, and policy development. Nationally, the US has done little or nothing in relation to any of these policies and has seen Congress, at the behest of the NRA, suppress funding for research dating back to 1996. Amnesty notes that countries not only have obligations to protect the life of individuals from state agents but from actual or foreseeable threats at the hands of private actors as well. Violence is especially foreseeable in low income neighborhoods with persistently high levels of violence, poor public services, and policing that may not comply with international standards.
It
is time to recognize public safety as a human right and for the US to adopt
national policies, such as the licensing of gun owners, restrictions on gun
carrying, and a ban on weapons of war.
Consistent with the notion that public safety is a human right, I have
drafted A Declaration of the Right of
Americans to Live Free from Gun Violence—please visit: http://thomasgaborbooks.com/a-declaration-of-rights/. I’m hoping
that different levels of government and groups concerned about gun policy will
endorse the Declaration and issue proclamations asserting that safety from gun
violence is a human right.
[i] For a review of the vast body of research on these matters, see T. Gabor’s Confronting Gun Violence in America (2019) or David Hemenway’s Private Guns, Public Health (2006).
[ii] FBI, A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United States Between 2000 and 2013.
[iii] Giffords Law Center, Second Amendment Basics; https://lawcenter.giffords.org/gun-laws/the-second-amendment/second-amendment-basics/
[iv] Universal Declaration of Human Rights; https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
[v] International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/ProfessionalInterest/ccpr.pdf
[vi] Children’s Defense Fund. Protect Children not Guns.
[vii] Amnesty International, In the Line of Fire: Human Rights and the US Gun Violence Crisis, p.5; https://www.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/egv_exec_sum.pdf
Should The CDC Sponsor Gun Research?
October 8, 2019
Blogs CDC, gun research, public health and guns 5 Comments
It has been more than 30 years since the CDC eliminated gun violence from its research budget, but the hiatus may be coming to an end. The Democrats have stuck $50 million into the CDC budget, whether the line item will survive the usual horse-trading between the House and the Senate remains to be seen. Nevertheless, the fact that the funding of gun research is even being discussed by all the Democratic Presidential candidates is a development which many of us believed we would never live to see.
That being the case, I find myself in something of a dilemma because I am not sure that any of this research will necessarily yield positive results. Why do I say this? How can I afford to disagree so radically from a time-honored narrative supported by virtually everyone who wants gun violence to come to an end? After all, public policies should always be based on valid research, and who can provide such research about gun violence except my friends in public health?
There’s only one little problem. Which is that the research activity on gun violence done by public health scholars to date lacks one, fundamental element that should be present in all evidence-based research, namely, a self-imposed requirement that the point of publishing research is to invite, indeed demand public critiques from other researchers in the same field.
Unfortunately, public health gun research is the only field of academic research which can’t seem to ever produce public debate of any kind. If I had a nickel for every gallon of ink spilled by public health researchers on the so-called mistakes made by John Lott, I could stop working for a living, go down to Delray Beach and buy a condo at King’s Point. On the other hand, if I had a nickel for every ounce of ink that public health researchers have spilled criticizing the work of themselves or their peers, maybe I should go down to Lake Okeechobee and rent an unfurnished trailer at Canal Point.
And by the way, I’m not so sure that Lott’s thesis about more legally-owned guns resulting in less crime is necessarily all that wrong. If you eliminate the words ‘legally-owned’ from his argument, what he says may be more correct than not. The problem with John’s work is that he assumes something about the spread of concealed-carry laws (CCW) which probably isn’t true; namely, that criminals intent on attacking someone else usually commit violent crimes against law-abiding folks.
In fact, most victims of violent crimes happen to be the same kinds of people who commit those crimes; younger, minority males living in inner-city neighborhoods being the most typical types of people treated in the ER for gun injuries, fatal or not. These young men don’t have CCW but probably more of them are now walking around with illegal guns. For all we know, Lott’s thesis that armed, self-defense may be an effective deterrent to violent crime might be correct, even if this deterrence factor is most frequently found within the criminal-prone population itself.
I began thinking about the ‘more guns = less crime’ argument from this perspective after reading research on gun violence published by criminologists, scholars for example like Marvin Wolfgang, whose studies on both teen-age delinquency and homicide have never been surpassed. Of course Wolfgang, considered by some to be the ‘most influential criminologist in the English-speaking world,’ is persona non-grata in the public health field since he had the audacity to suggest that maybe Gary Kleck’s research on armed, self-defense should not be simply dismissed.
I simply do not understand how anyone can claim to be conducting ‘evidence-based research’ when the evidence is never subject to public, critical review. Of course I hope the CDC restores funding for gun research, but I would also hope that the resumption of such funding be tied to some degree of critical, self-analysis by the public health research community itself.
I may be the smartest person I ever met, but there are plenty of folks who would disagree. Which is why anyone is free to post a comment on what I write.
Dave Buchannon: Legislation Can’t Fix This.
October 4, 2019
Blogs background checks, gun laws, Gun violence 5 Comments
Congress returned to work this week and the first order of business is gun control legislation, at least according to all the news we’ve been reading since El Paso and Dayton. The mission seems to be, “do something, anything, to make this stop.” Everyone’s talking about banning this gun or that high capacity magazine. There’s also the movement to pass a national red-flag law that will take guns away from those who shouldn’t be allowed to have guns because of their mental state. Or the best one yet – comprehensive background checks for every gun transfer.
It’s all hogwash that might make some people feel they’ve done something meaningful, but it will not change anything. Sadly, not one thing.
Because, no matter how horrible gun violence has become in America today, it is not something we can legislate away. The problem goes much, much deeper than anything a new law or background check can solve. Some would say its root is in bad parenting, genetics, is the result of our overcrowded prison system, a failed mental health system, gangs, the list could go on and on.
Dear Congress, write all the new laws you want (whether the President will sign them or not), wanna know why they won’t put a dent in gun violence? Because the bad guys don’t care about laws – isn’t that part of the definition of “bad guy?” No matter how many laws are enacted, the bad guys have already figured out a way to get around it. I could give two hoots what the NRA says about this, I’ve seen it first hand as a cop – if a bad guy wants a gun, he’s going to get a gun and there’s no law that’s going to stop him. Nice try.
Universal background checks are a great idea, if all of the agencies across the country are reporting as they are supposed to. They aren’t. Remember the Sutherland Park, Texas church shooting in November, 2017? It most likely wouldn’t have happened had the US Air Force reported Devin Patrick Kelley’s less than honorable discharge after his court-marshal for a domestic violence arrest. You see, he passed the NICS check when he bought the rifle he used in the shooting… because the US Air Force failed to report. Many states and municipalities do not report criminal or mental health issues that would prevent someone from buying a gun. So long as there are states, agencies, and armed forces that are not fully reporting to NICS, universal background checks will not work. Another nice try.
So what about those red flag laws everyone is crowing about? Congress can pass a national red flag law with the best of intentions. At some point an angry ex-spouse, ex-business partner, angry neighbor, or other person who is upset with a legal gun owner will fraudulently report that person as being a hazard to self or others. The lawyers will be circulating, waiting to sue the reporting party and challenge the law. The legal beagles will probably be successful because many of the state red flag laws currently on the books completely disregard any due process for the legal gun owner. In my home state of Massachusetts, no hearing is required before the police show up at the gun owner’s door with a warrant to seize his guns. After the gun owner has sold his house to pay the legal bills and proves he’s in charge of his faculties or never made any threats, how does he get his guns back? He doesn’t, because in Massachusetts there is no mechanism in the law to return the guns to the original owner. He winds up having to keep paying the bonded storage charges (yep, the owner has to pay for storage when’s guns are taken away). I give the red flag laws about a year before the courts over turn them.
What can be done? My point is that there is no single answer to the gun violence problem. Anyone who tells you passing a law will solve the problem is flat-out lying to you. If you believe and embrace this hokum-filled philosophy, I’m sorry, but you are sadly misguided. This is a much, much larger problem that has less to do with the gun than with larger societal issues.
How Should We Deal With Gun Violence?
October 2, 2019
Blogs criminology, gun injuries, Gun violence, Public health 1 Comment
Turner Syndrome is a genetic abnormality which results from an absence or partial absence of the X chromosome, preventing the development of healthy ovaries in women, as well as certain heart defects. It can be detected by genetic screening prior to birth, but sometimes a diagnosis doesn’t take place until the teen or young adult years. Once diagnosed, “girls and women with Turner Syndrome need ongoing medical care from a variety of specialists,” so says the Mayo Clinic. In other words, it’s a complicated disease.
How often does this disease appear? Roughly 1 out of 2,500 live births. If we take the best estimate for the number of fatal and non-fatal injuries caused by one person shooting a gun at someone else, the incidence of this type of gun violence within the age cohorts 16 through 34, would also be around 1 out of every 2,500 individuals in those age groups.
If we didn’t experience 90,000 fatal and non-fatal intentional gun assaults each year, it would be difficult to argue that gun violence should be considered a public health problem at all. But wait a minute, you say. What about the 20,000 people who end their lives every year by using a gun? Isn’t gun-suicide also a problem that needs to be addressed?
Of course we need to eliminate gun suicides but the issue in that instance is quite simple because overwhelmingly, people who commit gun suicides happen to use a gun that they legally own. And they use a gun because they know using a gun will almost always get done what they want to get done.
But that’s not the case with the homicides and aggravated assaults which account for more than 80% of all gun violence every year. This public health event is almost always committed by individuals who do not have legal access to the gun used in the assault. Which means that even before they use the gun to hurt someone else, they have already committed a serious crime. It’s called ‘illegal possession’ of a firearm which, under Federal law, can be punished by as much as five years in jail.
For all these reasons, I find it difficult to understand how my friends who conduct public health studies on gun violence seem to go out of their way to avoid contact with criminologists who have produced significant research on violent crime. I am referring, for example, to the study by Paul Tracy and Kimberly Kempf-Leonard, Continuity and Discontinuity in Criminal Careers, which analyzed the life histories of the 27,160 men and women born in Philadelphia in 1958, and followed them through 1984; in other words, from birth through age 26.
This longitudinal study allows criminologists to do what public health researchers do not do, namely, develop a profile of potentially high-risk behavior over time, rather than relying on one data entry for one point in time; i.e., when someone with a gun injury shows up for treatment in an ER. Here’s the bottom line: “The frequency of delinquent activity is the most consistent and strongest predictor of adult crime.”
What we get from public health gun research are the immediate symptoms which appear when the injury occurs. What we get from criminology is the case history leading up to the medical event. Can we really develop effective public policies to reduce gun violence without combining both?
This is why I began today’s column with a brief discussion of a medical problem – Turner’s Syndrome – that occurs within the overall population to the same degree as another medical problem – gun violence – occurs within the age cohorts which exhibit the overwhelming number of injuries caused by guns.
Diagnosing and treating Turner’s Syndrome is a very complicated affair. To repeat: it requires ‘ongoing medical care from a variety of specialists.’ Why should we approach gun violence in any less of a comprehensive way? When it comes to gun violence, public health and criminology should stop avoiding each other and join together to solve this dread disease.
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