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Do We Know What Causes Gun Violence?

October 30, 2023

mikethegunguy Blogs , 3 Comments

              Although this comment may read like it’s a defense of Ron DeSantis, not to worry, it’s not. But when a media type asks a public official about gun violence and the questioner gets the issue all wrong, I feel compelled to state the facts no matter who ends up looking good versus who looks bad.

              On Sunday, DeSantis was interviewed on Meet the Press by Kristen Welker and after he touted his great job on reducing crime, Welker said, “Governor, actually, statistically speaking, the CDC says that the firearm mortality rate is actually higher under your administration then it was under your predecessor’s administration,” and then they started talking over each other.

              Welker was correct. In 2017, two years before DeSantis became Governor, the firearm mortality number in Florida was 2,724 and in 2021 it jumped to 3,142, an increase of 15%.

              Now, if DeSantis had his shirt together, he might have agreed with Welker’s gotcha’ about the increase in Florida gun deaths, but then he could have pointed out that the national increase in gun deaths from 2017 to 2021 was more than 20%, and in the neighboring state of Louisiana it was 30%.

              We don’t have any ‘official’ gun violence numbers from the CDC since 2021, but the Gun Violence Archive, whose annual numbers aren’t that far off from what the CDC gives us, says that in 2022, the gun deaths numbered 3% less than what they numbered in 2021, and from what I have seen so far this year, 2023 might end up outstripping 2022.

              But wait one goddamn minute! I thought the increase in gun violence during 2020 and 2021 was due to the Pandemic, or at least this is how the issue was explained by the usual media suspects writing about guns. And not only did overall gun violence get worse during the onset and spread of the virus, but the medical impact of the pathogen, like the medical impact of gun violence, fell disproportionately on the poor and the underserved who always take it in the ass.

              Since everyone talked themselves into believing that a public health threat from disease creates a public threat from behavior, maybe someone could explain to me how come the mortality rate from Covid-19 dropped more than 45% from 2021 to 2022, yet the gun violence rate hardly changed at all.

              And by the way, I have yet to see or read anything from any of these so-called experts on gun violence who knew ‘for a fact’ that the social stressors created by the Pandemic explained the increase in gun violence demonstrating the modesty to admit that maybe, just maybe, they had no idea what they were talking about.

              You see, the problem is that when we talk about something known as ‘gun violence,’ we are talking about a specific type of behavior which, if nothing else, will often produce an injury which is much worse and results in a death much more frequently than any other type of behavior in which someone decides to hurt themselves or hurt someone else.

              From 2016 through 2021, here are the numbers for the four most common methods which Americans use to hurt themselves or someone else:

              Guns – 251,930

              Choking – 122,020

              Blades – 17,416

              Clubs – 6,647

              So, if you want to kill yourself or someone else, you pick up a gun, or some rope, or a knife or a Louisville Slugger. How many studies have you read which are based on interviews with a bunch of individuals who used any of those methods to commit a fatal assault on themselves or someone else? I’ll give you the answer. Try zilch.

              How do you come up with any degree of a realistic explanation of violence when you have absolutely no idea why a small percentage of Americans pick up a gun, or a knife, or a piece of rope, or a two-by-four and commit an assault? And please, don’t indulge yourself in thinking that the guy who killed himself by putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger or putting the gun to someone else’s head and pulling the trigger would have been unable to commit this behavior if we just had red flag laws in every state.

              And by the way, when we’re talking about homicide or aggravated assault, let’s remember that there are at least two individuals involved, and we don’t know why either of them behaved the way they did which led to one of them getting injured or killed.

              Back in the 1960’s Marvin Wolfgang studied more than 600 homicides in Philadelphia (Patterns in Criminal Homicide) by reading notes taken by the cops who investigated each case, notes based on interviews with either the perpetrator, the victim or both. What he learned was that in more than a quarter of these killings, the fatal assault was initiated by the behavior of the victim to which the perpetrator then responded with violence that caused a death.

              That was then, this is now. And now we know for a fact that violence increased because of the Pandemic, right? Yea, right.

What About Gun Violence After Maine?

October 27, 2023

mikethegunguy Blogs , 2 Comments

              One of these days, my dear friends in Gun-control Nation will wake up and actually begin agitating for the only thing which will eliminate or at least reduce the violence caused by guns. And that strategy happens to be the universal registration of all guns. And by the way, although Gun-nut Nation will immediately yell and scream about how universal gun registration is a ‘violation’ of their beloved 2nd Amendment, that happens not to be true.

              After all, we have had universal registration of all guns purchased from federally licensed gun dealers since 1968. And this process has been extended to gun transfers between private gun owners in a number of states.

              But registration isn’t a background check. I happen to have about 60 guns sitting around my house and the public safety agency in my state has about half of them on file. And my state – Massachusetts – happens to be one of those Communist states which requires all gun transfers to be registered and approved.

              Of course, were such a universal registration strategy to be promoted by the gun-control gang, we would immediately hear all the ‘slippery-slope’ bullshit from the other side. So what? Since when should any effective public policy rest on whether the people who have absolutely no idea what they are talking about rant and rave? Have we stopped vaccinating school children because RFK Jr. turns out to be a complete jerk?

              This week we had another horrendous slaughter of innocent human beings in Maine. This carnage didn’t occur in Texas, or Illinois, or some other state where gun violence has become an ordinary and normal thing. It took place in Maine, where the gun violence rate is so low that the CDC doesn’t even bother to figure it out.

              And by the way, because we don’t have gun registration in Maine, there was absolutely no way that the cops could have gone out and taken the guns away from the alleged shooter, even if he had been locked up in a loony bin for several years, not just for a couple of weeks.

              To show you how fucked up the situation is on the gun-control side, a few years ago the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on funding gun research, and the panel testifying in front of the Committee consisted of three pro-gun control experts from Johns Hopkins (Daniel Webster,) the American College of Surgeons (Ronald Stewart,) the RAND gun group (Andrew Morrall) and for the other side, the hated John Lott.

              At some point during the hearing an alt-right member of Congress from Maryland asked the panel whether they believed that universal gun registration would reduce gun violence. It was, of course, a ‘gotcha question’ because the alt-right shithead figured that Webster, Stewart and Morrall would come out in favor of universal registration and the pro-gun bunch could take that one right to the bank.

              Lott answered first and of course denied any connection between universal gun registration and reducing gun violence, touting instead his patented argument about how carrying a gun reduces the threat from guns.

              To my utter shock, the other three panelists agreed with Lott and said that universal registration wouldn’t do anything to reduce gun violence rates. These three guys lied to Congress. They all know that other advanced countries do not have our gun violence problem precisely because guns are registered and therefore don’t as quickly or easily fall into the ‘wrong hands.’

              And by the way, the hearing was televised on C-Span, so these three gun-control experts had an opportunity to explain to the entire American public why gun registration actually works.

              And now that we are past the ‘thoughts and prayers’ in Maine, particularly the prayers coming from Lauren Boebert who spelled Lewiston and Lewistown on her X page, our friends in Gun-control Nation can go back to promoting the idea that we need to toughen up the requirements for buying an assault rifle, or even God forbid, ban the damn things again.

              Know who held the record for the most people shot and killed in one place at one time? It was held by a student at Virginia Tech University who killed 32 people in 2007, which was the largest number of fatal victims until Omar Mateen killed 50 at the Pulse nightclub in 2016.

              Know what kind of a weapon Seung-Hui Cho used in his rampage? A Glock handgun. That’s what he used.

              As Grandpa would say, ‘shain zeit’ (read: enough is enough.)

              Know what’s the worst thing that would happen if Gun-control Nation stopped fucking around with such nonsense as an assault-rifle ban? The United States might actually begin thinking about eliminating private ownership of all guns designed solely for the purpose of ending human life.

              Would that be, as Grandpa would say, such a ‘gefailach?’ (read: big deal?)

Can We Reduce Gun Violence and Not Talk About Guns?

October 1, 2023

mikethegunguy Blogs , 6 Comments

              Our good friend Khalil has just sent me a report issued by the New Mexico Department of Health which evaluates the demographics of individuals recently presenting in state hospitals for injuries committed with the use of guns. You can download the report here.

              The very detailed report was put together because New Mexico appears to be a state which has experienced an alarming increase in intentional gun injuries, and it is presumed that getting a better understanding for who is shot by a gun will make a public health response to the problem more effective in the days to come.

              The report follows guidelines that were developed for another Health Department report which sets out a statewide strategic plan for preventing gun injuries which was published in 2021 and can be downloaded here.

              The report on who gets shot by guns in New Mexico finds that white residents of the state have not seen any significant increase as gun violence victimization over the last several years. But there had been a significant increase in gun injuries among Hispanics, Native Americans, and blacks since 2017, although the jump in all three racial groups was much higher from, 2017 to 2018 than during the Pandemic years.

              Th really bad news about gun violence demographics concerns the state resident population which are classified as black. Since 2019, blacks have represented more than 40% of all gun violence victims, but as a proportion of the overall state population, blacks represent between 2% and 5%.

              When gun deaths in New Mexico are broken down by circumstance, the data is roughly equal to the national numbers for the same events. Overall, gun suicides are roughly twice as frequent as gun homicides, with white suicide victims much more frequent than the number of suicides committed by blacks. Incidentally the suicide rate among blacks has always been much lower than the white suicide rate, which is somewhat difficult to understand, since blacks show a much more significant incidence than whites of the social factors which are associated with suicide, such as loss of income, family dispersal, etc.

              Has there ever been one, single study which has attempted to sort this problem out and perhaps come up with some ways in which the evident black resistance to suicide could be developed among whites? Nope, not one study at all. Not one. So much for the alleged compassion of public health for the underclass.

              Turning to the report on a strategic plan for preventing gun violence, here’s the plan:

  1. Identify at least two venues where stakeholders can regularly share information and resources regarding prevention of firearm injuries and deaths.
  2. Increase access to and use of firearm injury data in New Mexico by developing and implementing a firearm injury reporting system that uses standardized data elements and definitions.
  3.  Increase the evidence base for firearm injury prevention by conducting at least two public health practice studies or evaluations of firearm injury prevention strategies.
  4. Identify at least two mechanisms for dissemination of firearm injury data and prevention information to stakeholders and the general population.
  5. Participate in at least two activities to increase access to mental health and behavioral health services in New Mexico.

Ready?  Nowhere in either document is there a single mention or even hint that there wouldn’t be any gun violence in New Mexico or any other state if we just made the licensing of the guns used in gun violence a more comprehensive and detailed affair. Forty percent of the guns in New Mexico which are used to commit gun injuries are the types of guns which are designed solely for the purpose of being used to commit an intentional injury with a gun.

Should it come as a surprise that we have a gun-violence rate 7 to 20 times higher than any other advanced country, when no other country allows residents to own bottom-loading, hi-capacity handguns using military-grade ammunition, manufactured by companies like Glock, Sig, Kahr, Smith & Wesson, et. al?

Put such guns on the same restricted list which we use for full-auto guns and guess what happens to gun violence? The last time that someone was intentionally killed by getting shot with a full-auto gun was 1947 or 1948.