Someday shortly, I am going to start advertising a little book (90 pps.) that I have written about mass shootings. I wrote this book, Understanding Mass Shootings, because once again we are having a debate about mass shootings and typically, neither side in this debate really know what they are talking about.

            Now I don’t really mind if my friends in Gun-nut Nation shoot their mouths off and say things that really aren’t true, because the folks who belong to Gun-nut Nation just love their guns so they don’t really care what they say as long as they can’t be accused of not loving their guns. In fact, I have another book coming out (next month I think) titled, Why (Some) Americans Love Their Guns, in which I explain how and why gun owners think about their guns.

            This second book also attempts to explain how and why members of Gun-control Nation think about guns. But I do mind when my friends in Gun-control Nation get it confused or get it wrong because these are people who claim to be committed to ‘evidence-based’ information or are the actual creators of this so-called ‘evidence-based’ research.

            What I have never understood about the researchers and advocates who are seriously committed to reducing gun violence, is how they contribute to this debate without knowing anything about guns. They know all about the number of people who are killed or injured with guns. They know all about the laws we have passed that regulate guns. But they don’t know squat about guns.

            One of the leading gun-control researchers who first got into injury research by working with Ralph Nader told me that he didn’t need to know anything about the gun industry because when he worked with Nader, he didn’t know anything about the automobile industry, but he was still able to figure out how to make cars safer to drive.

            And this was my response: A car is designed to get someone from here to there. If there’s an accident before the car gets from here to there, you figure out if the accident was caused by a design problem, a mechanical defect, or the way the driver drove the car. But if I pull my Glock 17 out and blow your head off, that gun is operating exactly the way it was designed to operate.

            So, if you don’t know how guns are designed and how they operate when they are used the way they are designed to be used, how do you know what to do to change the result? You don’t.

            And by the way, the World Health Organization defines violence as the attempt to injure yourself or someone else. But the WHO doesn’t differentiate between ‘good’ violence and ‘bad’ violence, the way my friends both in Gun-nut Nation and Gun-control Nation discuss these two different types of violence when the issue is violence caused by guns.

            If you shoot someone in self-defense, you still committed a violent act. That’s such a worthwhile way to behave? How about just run away or better yet, keep your mouth shut so that you avoid an argument which then becomes deadly because you or the other guy pull out a gun.

            Is it so terrible to back down? Of course, if you have a gun in your pocket you don’t have to back down, right? Anyway, back to my little book about understanding mass shootings which will be available in the next couple of days.

            Some of the experts say that a mass shooting is four or more persons killed in the same place more or less at the same time. Other experts define a mass shooting as four or more persons injured or killed.

            Why is the number of shooting victims who wind up either in the morgue or in the morgue and the ER set at four? It used to be five. Now it’s four. Some science, I must say.

            In my little book I focus on mass shootings not by the number of victims per se, but rather by how many targets the shooter tries to hit. To me, a mass shooting or what Louis Klarevas calls a ‘rampage’ shooting, is when someone tries to shoot as many persons as he can, regardless of whether he has any personal connection to any of his victims at all.

            Most, if not nearly all the shootings where 4 victims are hit, happen to be disputes between two individuals, one of whom pulls out a gun and starts banging away, and a couple of other persons get hit because they happen to be standing close by. The cops tell me that over the past few years, what they see is young guys who used to get off one or two shots and now just spray the gun all over the place.

            To lump such behavior in with the kid who shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School and then popped off more than 150 rounds which killed 26 people in less than five minutes, is to guarantee that we won’t ever figure out how or why either type of shootings occur.

            My little book is an effort to place these episodes of mass violence within the context of how products manufactured and marketed by the gun industry have changed. I bring to the discussion about mass shootings the only thing I bring to every gun violence issue about which I write, namely, I know something about guns.