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Guns Shops Are Now Critical Infrastructure That Will Protect Us From COVID-19.

April 8, 2020

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Our friend John Feinblatt has just published an editorial on CNN’s website stating that Trump’s decision to exempt gun shops from the advisory list of businesses that should be shut down during the COVID-19 crisis is “both shameful and nonsensical.” I happen to agree. Feinblatt, who heads the Everytown organization (that’s the premier gun-grabbing group in the entire world, in case you didn’t know) goes on to list the threats from guns in the current situation, noting in particular that domestic violence and gun accidents involving children will probably increase since everyone is now stuck at home.

I suspect that if the virus continues to mount, that Feinblatt’s concerns may well be borne out. This is particularly the case as the virus spreads from big cities into rural zones because when you get out into the small towns, everyone has a gun. And usually more than one.

What I find most concerning about Schmuck-o’s decision to exempt gun shops from the advisory list is the fact that the official Department of Homeland Security’s announcement defines people who work in gun shops as ‘critical infrastructure workers,’ right up there with workers who respond to emergencies like natural disasters, accidents, and anything having to do with the firemen or the cops. Indeed, the exemption for guns covers the entire gun industry supply chain from manufacturers, retailers, importers, distributors – even shootings ranges need to remain open during this critical time.

I must admit, by the way, that I am somewhat more sanguine than Feinblatt about all these so-called ‘first time’ gun wannabees rushing into gun stores. I recall a similar, somewhat briefer surge in my gun shop after 9-11; I also recall that when it was clear that Bin Laden was not going to be leading an invading army down the streets of Philadelphia (none other than Newt Gingrich claimed that such a plan was in the works) that many of the guns that people scoffed up to defend themselves against further attacks were returned, most of them never having been removed from the original factory case.

I also have to raise a slight demur with our friend John Feinblatt who reminds us that by granting a commercial privilege to the gun industry, the Schmuck-o Administration is elevating the 2nd Amendment into a “super right above all other rights.” Oh, don’t worry. Mike the Gun Guy™ isn’t about to all of a sudden voice a new-found devotion for gun ‘rights.’

To the contrary, there’s no such thing as a free-standing, gun ‘right.’ The 2nd Amendment isn’t a ‘right’ of any kind. It’s an addition to a legal document that was written in Philadelphia and then ratified by nine states and became legal on June 21st, 1788. The so-called gun ‘rights’ embodied in that document were defined by two federal laws, the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968. These laws define the kinds of guns that Americans can own (NFA34) and the kinds of people who can own guns (GCA68). I don’t see anything either law which defines anyone connected to the gun industry as being workers in some kind of ‘critical infrastructure’ at all.

Which is why, when all is said and done, the pronouncement which lists gun-shop sales clerks as being on a par with hospital workers, cops, firemen and other first responders is a load of pure, unadulterated crap. Does it give the gun industry a brief boost in revenues after three and a half years of near-total collapse? Sure. On March 11th, Smith & Wesson stock hit its lowest point in the last five years – a couple of pennies over 6 bucks a share. Now it’s rebounded way up to 7 bucks and change. Big, friggin’ deal.

Kudos to John Feinblatt for making an argument about guns based both on reliable data and good, common sense, even though all Schmuck-o is really doing is rewarding the gun industry for what he hopes will be another 30 million in donations for his 2020 campaign

Why Should The Gun Debate Have Anything To Do With Facts?

March 25, 2019

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              So now that Democrats no longer have to fear that talking about gun control is a big no-no on the campaign trail, how will Gun-nut Nation respond?  For the last twenty-five years, the alliance between the GOP and the 2nd-Amendment gang held firm, and with the exception of a few Congressional seats in Communist states like California and New York, all a politician needed to do was wave the ‘don’t tread on me’ flag as regards gun ‘rights’ and the issue would disappear. 

              Thanks to some serious spending, the media spotlight grabbed by the Parkland kids and some overreach by various pro-gun Congressional candidates, the case can probably be made that the ability of the blue team to wrest control of the lower chamber of Congress certainly wasn’t hurt by a more aggressive gun-control pitch in many swing districts and might have even helped.

              So the question which now looms for 2020, particularly in key swing states whose votes will probably determine whether or not we have to put up with that schmuck for four more years, is this: How does Gun-nut Nation move the needle back to the center-right or at least the center of the gauge which measures the respective strength of the two sides in the gun debate?

              For the last twenty-five years, the gun-nut noise machine has promoted itself through a combination of patriotism (2nd-Amendment ‘rights,’) and protection from crime (concealed-carry and stand your ground.) But what made the NRA appear to be such a fearsome political opponent was the simple fact that there was basically no opposition from the other side. Occasionally there would be a break-through, like the Million Moms March put together by our friend Donna Dees Thomases in 2000, but by and large the pro-gun narrative went unchallenged in most parts of the country, even in places where a majority of voters didn’t own guns.

              Without doubt, Sandy Hook was a watershed event, because out of the tragedy of senseless violence emerged a true, national, grass-roots effort funded primarily by Mike Bloomberg and his friends, and organized by a little lady from Indianapolis named Shannon Watts. For the first time the pro-gun narrative was countered by a gun-control argument which continues to shape the entire gun debate, namely, that you just can’t justify 35,000 or more fatal shootings each year as representing some kind of support for ‘civil rights.’ Sorry, but the argument just doesn’t work, particularly when, every once in a while, some of those 35,000 victims happen to be kids sitting inside a school.

              So what do you do if the health and welfare of your particular industry depends on whether the average, law-abiding American consumer can still have more or less free access to the products on whose sale your industry depends? You come up with a way to argue the issue which may or may not have any connection to reality at all.

              What caught my eye in this respect was an op-ed in The Daily Mississippian, ‘The Truth About Guns,’ whose author approaches the subject without even the slightest concern for the relevant facts. Here’s the formative statement: “States like Illinois and California have implemented increasingly strict laws against gun ownership, but numbers of gun deaths per capita in those states is significantly higher than in places like Mississippi, where permits are not required in order to own firearms.”  

              Ready?  The gun-violence rate in California from 2010 to 2016 was 7.92, in Illinois it was 9.29.  In Mississippi, the rate was 18.15.  This op-ed was published in the student newspaper on the campus of Ole Miss, so we shouldn’t expecting the editorial staff to operate as if they are running The New York Times.

             But I have a funny feeling that this is the kind of narrative, devoid of even the slightest concern for facts, which is how Gun-nut Nation will define its side of the 2020 gun debate.  After all, the guy who’s still heading the GOP ticket wouldn’t know a fact if it hit him in the face.

Don’t Count The NRA Out.

January 14, 2019

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              Now that the gun-control movement finds itself in an alliance with the House majority, instead of the House minority, joy abounds. And why not? How long has it been since Nancy wielded the gavel? Wow! And not only do we have friends in high places, so to speak, but the vaunted Trump-NRA combine which first reared its ugly head back in 2016, now seems to have collapsed.

              Granted, banning bump stocks is nothing more than a cosmetic attempt to pretend that something is being done to reduce the toll of gun violence, but you can’t tell me that anyone in Gun-control Nation would have predicted that even this mild rebuke of the joy of shooting was going to occur under the Trump regime, right?

              But even more to the point, when was the last time you picked up a copy of The Trace at your friendly internet news stand and not read a story about how the NRA is being accused of illegal campaign contributions, or how the NRA is going broke, or how a Russian ‘spy’ used the NRA to infiltrate America’s political elite. Just my luck, I give America’s ‘first civil rights organization’ money to set up an endowment, and it goes down the drain. But to all my friends in Gun-control Nation, do yourselves a favor and don’t start dressing for a big funeral at Fairfax just yet, okay?

              Yesterday I received my daily email from Friends of NRA ( I also receive daily emails from Everytown and Brady, just to balance things out) which invited me to “Join Second Amendment Supporters in Your Community for an Evening of Fellowship, Firearms, and Fundraising for the Shooting Sports!” The email then goes on to list social events that are already planned in New England between March and September in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Vermont. How many evenings of fun and fellowship are on the calendar so far?  Try 20 events. That’s twen…ty events, not five or ten. Twen…ty.

              And by the way, although folks in New England tend to stay indoors in January and February, the national gun show calendar lists 79 weekend shows just between January 18th and January 27th in other parts of the country, and I guarantee you that by March, there will be a gun show every weekend in at least one New England state.  Does the NRA do a booth and sign up members at every gun show? Does the bear sh*t in the woods? Is New York a city? No – it’s a jungle! Anyway….

              The point is that anyone who believes the NRA is on the verge of collapse is whistling Dixie, believe it or not. Because the one thing they have going for them, actually the two things, are: 1) they are a real membership organization in a way that none of the gun-control groups can even begin to compare; and 2) this membership shares one, very fundamental trait, namely, they love to get together and talk about their guns.

              Groups like Everytown and Brady attract supporters who agree that something needs to be done to reduce the violence caused by guns. Fine. But believe it or not, people don’t join the NRA because they want to show their support for 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’ Yea, that nonsense goes with the package when you get your membership kit, and Wayne-o will get up at the 2019 national meeting in Indianapolis and whine that ‘our God-given ‘right’ to defend ourselves is under attack.’ You think any NRA member who comes to the show because he has been coming to the show every year really cares?

              If you ask the average NRA member whether his organization bears any responsibility for the 125,000 Americans who are killed or injured each year with guns, he’ll stare at you as if you just landed from Mars. And this is the reason why the NRA right now may be down, but I wouldn’t count them out just yet.

Want To End Gun Violence? Join The NRA.

November 30, 2018

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From time immemorial I have been listening to my friends in Gun-control Nation complain about the power and influence of the NRA.  They have so much money, so many political connections and now they even have an unabashed booster in the Oval Office, even though his boosterism seems, of late, to have begun to fade.

              There’s no question that America’s ‘first civil rights organization’ has hit a rough patch. Revenues are have gone South, corporate partnerships are in disarray, their vaunted, new training program CarryGuard is a flop, and viewership of the NRA-TV media channel is down and staff has been laid off.

The biggest problem the NRA faces is that the gun industry has not shown any recovery from the doldrums into which it sank immediately after out first Kenyan-born President moved from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue into a private home.  Try as they might, gun makers have simply never found a marketing message which makes people want to buy guns unless these same people are afraid that they won’t be able to buy or own guns.

Putting all these factors together means that an organization that was able to count on the unquestioned support and loyalty of four or five million gun owners, all of a sudden finds itself on the wrong side of the curve. But there is an answer to their problem which Gun-control Nation should address. The NRA doesn’t  have any membership requirement that forces a member to own a gun. For that matter, the boys in Fairfax also cannot demand that any member necessarily agree with what the organization says or does. The last thing the NRA is about to do is impose some kind of membership qualification based on speech. After all, how can America’s ‘first civil rights organization’ be seen as being against free speech?

What does it cost to become a member of the NRA? A whole, big $45 bucks a year.  You can join right here, and very quickly you will start receiving a monthly magazine of your choice, along with at least one daily email from Wayne-o or Chris Cox. And don’t tell me you can’t afford the 45 bucks, okay?  I paid that much for a party pizza and a couple of six-packs last weekend which lasted until half-time of the Patriots and Jets (boy do my beloved Jets suck this year.)

I know a number of Gun-control Nation fanatics who tell me they would never join the NRA because such an act would be tantamount to giving care and comfort to the enemy. But that’s a very short-sighted and self-defeating view. What if MOMS, Brady, Everytown and Gabby told all their supporters and Facebook followers to sign up?  Could the NRA find itself with a million new email addresses?  Sure. Could these new members form their own social media groups and respond to every email from Wayne-o and Chris by publicly announcing their objections to what the NRA leaders have to say?  Of course.  What would happen if Ollie North received 500,000 emails from NRA members which told him to dry up and get lost? Think that wouldn’t make media headlines?  Think again.

I would understand Gun-control Nation’s anger over NRA messaging were those messages coming from a closed, private group.  But joining the NRA takes about 5 minutes, and all of a sudden, you are now part of an organization which never forgets to tell its members that they are special and unique.

What makes NRA members so special?  Allegedly it’s because they own at least one gun. If anything, I think that NRA members who didn’t own guns would constitute an even more unique and special group. So why not take advantage of the opportunity to pay the paltry sum of $45 a year and use your membership to promote Gun-control Nation’s views on guns from inside the tent, rather than always standing outside and trying to piss in? Remember, it’s only going to cost you what you’ll pay for another party pizza delivered before the 3rd quarter begins.

 

Levi-Strauss Understands Gun Violence – It’s The Gun.

September 5, 2018

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,             If there’s one brand name out there which we associate with the Old West, it’s not Smith & Wesson or Colt, it’s Levi’s, as in Levi-Strauss.  Their signature product, denim jeans held together with copper rivets rather than just plain thread, didn’t really become a mass market item until long after the frontier was closed, but the name and those leather labels still evokes everything which symbolizes how and when the U.S.A. was formed.

levi's             All of a sudden it seems, the company has decided to make a very strong and very public statement about guns. And it’s not a statement about how Winchester and Levi-Strauss won the West. To the contrary, in an open letter to Fortune Magazine, a publication you’ll find on the coffee table of virtually every business leader in the United States, Levi’s CEO, Chip Bergh, is urging the business sector to take what he calls a ‘stand on gun violence, which follows from a company policy announced in 2016 which banned guns from all Levi’s stores. The policy even applies to stores located in jurisdictions where carrying a gun is permitted by law.

Did the company receive the usual assortment of nasty emails and threats from the usual collection of pro-gun trolls?  Of course. Did Bergh and the company’s other executives back down?  Here’s his final comment from the 2016 piece: “In the end, I believe we have an obligation to our employees and customers to ensure a safe environment and keeping firearms out of our stores and offices will get us one step closer to achieving that reality.”

Did Levi-Strauss suffer at the cash register the way that a gaggle of alt-right trolls is claiming Nike will see its sales collapse because of the new ad campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick that even has Sleazy Don weighing in to remind everyone that he’s America’s Patriot Number One? Levi’s has been privately-owned so we can’t determine whether they have paid any kind of price with falling revenues since they announced the ban.  The company has left open the issue of enforcement but the message is clear: one of America’s most storied and celebrated business organizations has decided to turn its back on guns.

In addition to the open letter, the company is also putting its money behind its mouth in the form of a million-dollar Safer Tomorrow Fund that will support what it calls “the work of nonprofits and youth activists who are working to end gun violence in America.”  The company is also doubling the match it donates when employees support organizations that get involved with the Fund. Most important, and this is a point which needs to be emphasized by anyone and everyone who supports the decision by Levi-Strauss, the company is going to partner with a new group of business leaders who want to reduce gun violence; it’s called the Everytown Business Leaders for Gun Safety, started by you-know-who.

Nobody on either side of the gun issue should underestimate the importance of this move. And the importance isn’t a function of the deep pockets of Mike Bloomberg, although that never hurts. What’s really important about this new campaign is that we finally have an effort to focus gun violence where it really belongs, namely, on the companies who create the 125,000 gun deaths and injuries each year because they make the guns.

I don’t know of another advocacy campaign aimed at reducing injuries from a consumer product in which the companies which make the product are so hidden from public view. And please don’t make the mistake of thinking for one minute that the 2nd Amendment is any kind of protective shield behind which gun manufacturers can hide. It’s not. Period.  But again and again the gun-control movement tries to come up with policies and laws that regulate the behavior of gun owners while exempting the gun makers from greater scrutiny and regulatory review.

Recall the 1992 Presidential campaign slogan ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ Now replace the word ‘economy’ with the word ‘gun’ and you have the real importance of what Levi-Strauss plans to do.

 

Now That The March Is Over, What’s Next?

March 26, 2018

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Now that the smoke is beginning to clear and the dust beginning to settle from Saturday’s remarkable events, we get down to the nitty-gritty and try to figure out what comes next. Because if the gun violence prevention (GVP) movement doesn’t figure out how to build on this past weekend’s display of genuine interest and concern by millions of people who never previously thought about the issue of gun violence, an opportunity which I have never previously seen in my lifetime will have come and gone.

march              I spent Saturday at a march in the toney, seaside town of Old Saybrook, where the organizers were expecting 500-600 people more or less, the cops ended up estimating the crowd at around 2,500, and there might have been even more. I spoke perhaps to 30-40 people, not one of them had ever previously been involved in any kind of activity dealing with guns. Not that these were hardcore gun owners, of course not; this is a wealthy town and the only hard-core you get around here are people whose trust funds together could probably pay off the national debt.

The point is that GVP activists and advocates have often felt themselves marginalized by the mainstream which gets concerned for a day or two when something really bad happens like Parkland or Sandy Hook, but then turn to other issues, allowing the NRA and the gun industry to define and set the terms of the debate. What was interesting this time was the degree to which the usual pro-gun noisemakers had little or nothing to say; the NRA rolled out a spiel from spokesman Colion Noir who pranced around but was basically ignored; the video of Emma Gonzalez allegedly tearing up the Constitution turned out to be a fake. Even Trump came back from hiding out in Florida and kept his mouth shut about what happened on the 24th.

It turns out however, that the NRA hasn’t been particularly silent, they’ve just decided for the moment to follow the lead of the Parkland kids and promote themselves on social media, particularly Facebook, where they spent an average of $47,300 a day on advertising, up from a daily average of $11,300 before Parkland took place. The problem for the NRA however, is it doesn’t matter how much they spend, they don’t have a message that can reach anyone beyond the folks they always reach. And the way they reach their audience is to mix together the usual bromides about freedom, 2nd-Amendment rights and protecting family and home with a nasty and shrill condemnation of the tree-huggers on the other side.

They were at it again last week with a series of video clips in which the usual NRA noisemakers (Loech, Stinchfield) discounted the impact of the demonstrations by running the usual ‘Bloomberg-Soros conspiracy’ up the flagpole and warning parents to avoid having anything to do with the ‘socialist’ efforts to brainwash their kids. Believe me, none of the people with whom I talked at the Old Saybrook march would be swayed by that kind of crap.

To Bloomberg’s credit, not only is he going out of his way to let everyone know that he’s putting his money on the line, but Everytown has just announced a million-dollar grant program to fund more “student driven advocacy” and spur more than 200 additional organizing events planned for the next couple of weeks. What the NRA doesn’t seem to realize is that demonizing Bloomberg doesn’t make a bit of difference to these kids and warning their parents about the evils intentions of gun-grabbers doesn’t fly at all.

The reason the NRA’s Eddie Eagle isn’t flying so high is very simple; a bunch of high school kids took advantage of funding from people like Bloomberg and showed everyone that you can’t sell violence by pretending that violence can be used to achieve good end. ‘Guns don’t kill people’ doesn’t work when a shooter walks into a high school with a loaded gun. The Parkland kids had no trouble figuring that one out.

 

A Little Suggestion For Funding Gun Violence Research.

November 21, 2016

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One of Gun-sense Nation’s primary concerns that will now linger in an unfinished state is the question of funding public health research into guns.  The major funding source – CDC – was shut down in the 1990s, but while private sources stepped in to try and close the gap, much important work remains undone. And analyzing both this unfinished agenda and its implications for gun violence prevention (GVP) advocacy and policy are the subjects of a commentary by Everytown’s innovation director, Ted Alcorn, that recently appeared in a JAMA issue published online.

ph                 Before I go further into Alcorn’s discussion, I need to make my own thoughts and biases about gun-violence research clear.  As someone who holds a Ph.D. in Economic History and published several university monographs on same before getting into writing about guns, I would never, ever suggest or imply that serious research on any topic is anything other than a good thing.  But I am occasionally dismayed by what I perceive to be a desire on the part of gun-violence researchers to present themselves as being ‘neutral’ or ‘unbiased’ when it comes to the reason they study violence caused by guns.  I don’t think that a researcher should feel at all reluctant to state the obvious, which is that without guns there would be no gun violence. And if the political powers-that-be feel that 120,000 gun deaths and injuries each year are a price worth paying for a cynically-invented fiction known as 2nd-Amendment ‘rights,’ there’s no reason why any serious researcher should pay respectful homage to all that Constitutional crap. Because it’s not as if Gun-nut Nation would ever believe that any research into gun violence could be free of bias anyway since they don’t believe there’s really anything called ‘gun violence’ at all.

But let’s get back to what Ted Alcorn has to say.  He and his research group looked at 2,207 scholarly articles published between 1960 and 2014, and discovered that the number of yearly articles doubled between 1984 and 1990, then doubled again between 1990 and 1994-95, then doubled again by the early 2000’s, and then plateaued until they increased again noticeably in 2013-14.  In other words, the volume of gun research as measured by the number of published articles has not specifically increased since the mid-90’s, except for what has recently happened, no doubt due to the fallout from Sandy Hook.

More problematic than the fact that the number of scholarly resources has been essentially unchanged for the last twenty years is that the general interest in gun violence research, as measured by the number of times that scholarly articles are cited, reached a high-watermark in 1988 and then declined more than 60% through 2012.  This corresponds with the fact that the number of active gun-violence researchers also plateaued in the late 1990’s and has not increased ever since.

The problem facing gun research is not the absence of research funding per se.  It’s that the absence of research dollars tends to discourage new researchers from entering the field.  And when all is said and done, advances in science have a funny way of growing because more people not only conduct that research in a particular field, but also share their research, critique each other’s research and, most of all, conduct more research.

I think the idea that manna from heaven will ever again appear for government-sponsored gun violence research is a non-starter at best, a pipe dream at worst.  But I have an idea that I want to run up the flagpole about where to find money for this kind of research.  There’s a little foundation out there which happens to be sitting on $400 million bucks.  They refer to what they do as ‘life-changing work.’ What could be more life-changing than saving the lives of 120,000 Americans each year who are killed and injured by guns? The outfit is run by Donna Shalala who gave out plenty of gun-violence research money when she headed HHS from 1993 to 2001. Shouldn’t Gun-sense Nation give her a call?

If The Facts Don’t Support Gun-nut Nation, Why Bother With Facts?

November 21, 2016

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Now that we have a President-elect who has made a virtue out of not even trying to distinguish between fact and fiction in debates about public policy, we will begin to see this confusion appear in public policy discussions about guns.  Actually, it’s not a confusion at all; rather, the door is now open for Gun-nut Nation to say anything they want to say about guns because as long as they say it, then it must be true. And if the other side says it, since they lost on November 8th, it’s false.

ccw           How long did it take for this new approach to appear?  Exactly one week following the election, with an article in National Review. The author, Andrew Branca, a self-described expert on self-defense, floats around the alt-right radio world and also teaches self-defense ‘law’ on a website which, of course, contains the usual disclaimer that none of the content ‘accurately communicates laws or court decisions,’ too bad these classes can’t be listed any longer on the Trump University curriculum.

The subject of the NR critique is an article which just appeared in a leading medical journal, JAMA – Internal Medicine, which finds a clear connection between the ‘Stand Your Ground’ law in Florida and an increase in homicide in the Gunshine State. The article looked at homicide rates and gun-homicide rates between 1999 and 2014, and found a significant increase in both trends after the SYG law was passed in 2005. This increase was particularly evident for age groups 20-35 and for males, which happen to be the two most common demographic categories for gun violence overall.

This is not the first study which links SYG laws to increases in gun violence and violence in general.  The Everytown research group found that after the law was passed, the justifiable homicide rate tripled, with most of the victims, not surprisingly, being young, Black men.  A detailed study based on Texas data showed that such laws did not deter crimes like assault, robbery or burglary, but did lead to an increase in murder and manslaughter. In other words, if you walk around armed and are not required to first back down when facing what you believe to be a criminal threat, you might end up shooting someone but you won’t be protecting yourself or your community from crime.

Which is exactly the opposite of what Gun-nut Nation claims is the reason for walking around with a gun. And you can be sure that you’ll hear this nonsense again and again next year when the NRA leads the charge to get a national, concealed-carry law on the Chief Executive’s desk. Which brings us back to Branca’s critique of the JAMA new study on the effects of the Florida STG laws; a critique based on a misuse of data that reaches colossal terms.

Branca states that the SYG study is ‘fatally flawed’ because it does not distinguish between murder on the one hand and homicide on the other and, in many cases, murder turns out to be a reasonable response by a victim to a violent crime.  And since the whole point of STG laws is to give a crime victim an opportunity to defend himself before or during the commission of a crime, of course the number of people killed would go up as all these gun-toting community defenders use their guns to protect themselves and everyone else.

.  In Florida, the average annual homicide rate increased from 600 to 840 after STG was passed. Meanwhile, according to the FBI, the number of justifiable homicides recorded throughout the entire United States averaged roughly 280 per year for the years covered by the JAMA report  Should we assume, therefore, that every, single act of justifiable homicide occurred only in the Gunshine State? And that’s the level of stupidity masquerading as informed opinion that we will now face when it comes to the public debate about guns.

A Guest Editorial From Ladd Everitt

August 9, 2016

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I’ve been working in the gun violence prevention field for 16 years now as a volunteer and professional. As reflected by the events at the recent Democratic National Convention, there is no doubt the movement is in the best shape it’s ever been in.

The convention dedicated an entire program to gun violence prevention (GVP) on its most electrifying night, Wednesday. DNC 2016 included emotional appearances by gun violence survivors like Mothers of the Movement (the surviving mothers of Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Jordan Davis and Dontre Hamilton) and Erica Smegielski from the Everytown Survivor Network. It also featured riveting speeches by the likes ofReverend William Barber (a powerful nonviolence icon) in favor of an Assault Weapons Ban (AWB). “You heard, you saw, family members of police officers killed in the line of duty because they were outgunned by criminals,” saidDemocratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in her acceptance speech. “I refuse to believe we can’t find common ground here.”

It was a defining moment for a movement that has built significant capacity since the awful tragedy that happened on December 14, 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut.

Much of that progress has been led by the movement’s two most powerful groups, Everytown for Gun Safety and Americans for Responsible Solutions (ARS). Their PACs have dramatically changed the political calculus of legislators across the country. And Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America (under the Everytown umbrella) has been an ever-present grassroots force in states across the country.

But important questions hang in the air…

With so many gun violence survivors and gun violence prevention champions in elected government now aggressively calling for an Assault Weapons Ban — after having seen the Orlando gunman decimate a civilian population with the MCX rifle designed for members of our Special Forces — why are the two most powerful groups in the GVP movement, Everytown and ARS, still refusing to even mention the issue, much less support a ban? Shouldn’t the GVP “Bigs” be setting the agenda for their elected (and cultural) champions, much like the NRA does on the pro-gun side? What does the movement lose by pursuing a more moderate agenda — i.e., overwhelmingly popular policies like expanding background checks and prohibiting suspected terrorists from purchasing firearms — that fail to motivate its most ardent supporters?

We are now seeing a constellation of new individuals and groups emerging to assume a bolder posture on the issue. They are less rigid on policy and willing to embrace solutions from the ground up. They are acting aggressively to confront our nation’s degenerate gun culture. They are totally unapologetic. [And they are just the tip of the spear. With the cultural tide on the issue shifting, more will soon follow.] Among them are:

· Celebrity hairdresser Jason Hayes has crowd-funded more than $40,000 (average contribution $21) to put on a “Disarm Hate” rally on the National Mall on Saturday, August 13th. The rally will endorse a renewal of the Assault Weapons Ban.

· Po Murray and David Stowe of Newtown Action Alliance have done phenomenal work to organize a coalition of 97 different organizations that support an Assault Weapons Ban renewal. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (the third and final “Big”) is part of that coalition.

· Anonymous men and women from across the country have created “The Betsy Riot,” a social norming project with a suffragette theme that aggressively confronts gun idolatry and gun culture at large.

· Gays Against Guns has stood up in response to the Orlando massacre and is building chapters across the country. They are conducting in-your-face protests at a number of high-profile venues, such as Trump Tower.

Taking it to the Streets, GAG Style

· The National Action Network is preparing an August 27th rally at the DC lobbying offices of the NRA that will launch 72 days of action. This will involve civil disobedience.

· Marylanders to Prevent Gun Violence got a handgun licensing law enacted in their state and are the policy’s strongest proponent in the movement today.

· Actor/LGBTQ rights activist George Takei has launched One Pulse for America [I’m their director], a rapidly growing Facebook group with 70,000+ members. Members, described as “the folks who have been dying to turn up the volume and just needed to find the right muse,” are asked to take action on gun violence prevention on a daily basis.

The goal of these groups will be to close the oft-discussed “Passion Gap.” You can imagine what it looks like in practice. When a legislator hears from the pro-gun side, most often he/she is hearing the message, “I’m a single-issue voter. If you support any gun reform — no matter how modest — and fail to pass permissive gun policies, I will do everything I can to end your political career.” When they hear from the gun violence prevention side, it’s typically, “I care about reducing gun violence in our country. Please vote to expand background checks today.”

There’s no comparison. And when compromises are hammered out by legislators on gun legislation, pro-gun activists are almost invariably successful in “moving the middle” to their side and making those policies more favorable to the gun lobby.

I also think there is an opportunity to reach out to people who feel like they don’t have a home in the contemporary gun violence prevention movement. I see these folks on social media all the time. I meet them at rallies.

Remember, we’re living in an era of daily mass shootings. There are many people who would like to live in a society without guns; or at least with dramatically fewer guns and far tougher controls. Controls that you would typically see in every other free nation on the planet. They haven’t had a voice in the GVP movement since the late 1980s, when Handgun Control and the National Coalition to Ban Handguns changed their names to the Brady Campaign and Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, respectively, and began arguing for more moderate policies.

Currently, there is no advocacy in the movement for the following policy options:

· Licensing and registration laws, which have proven enormously effective at denying firearms to dangerous individuals in states that have implemented such laws. Virtually all other democracies have licensing and registration laws at the national level. They have astronomically lower rates of gun death, and there has been no loss of individual freedom whatsoever. [See Alan Berlow’s excellent article on the topic.]

· Larger gun buyback programs at the state and/or national level.

· Computerizing records of gun sales maintained by federally licensed firearm dealers and the ATF (out-of-business dealers).

· Comprehensive updating of the prohibited categories for gun buyers defined in the (amended) 1968 Gun Control Act, based on the best evidence/research currently available in 2016.

· Mandated requirements for smart guns and crime-solving technologies (microstamping).

· Outright opposition to private citizens carrying firearms in public, except under “May-Issue” systems that give law enforcement discretion to deny permits to individuals with a history of violence.

Nor is any organization in the movement really challenging the legitimacy of the controversial 2008 D.C. v. Heller decision, in which the Supreme Court’s conservative wing rewrote 200+ years of judicial interpretation of the Second Amendment, declaring a newfound individual “right” to keep a handgun in your home. [Contrast this with the approach taken on Citizen United.]

This is about the time where some anxious critic stops me and says, “Fine, but Ladd — If you advocate for things like gun bans — even one as limited as the federal AWB — you’re going to be feeding into NRA confiscation rhetoric and we’ll be doomed!”

But listen. The NRA has been promoting confiscation propaganda for decades now with no provocation whatsoever. The NRA’s www.gunbanobama.comwas up and running long before President Obama ever addressed the GVP issue during his second term. And look what the gun lobby has to say about Everytown founder Michael Bloomberg, a guy politely calling for modest policies.

I’d say we’ve suffered about as much as we’re going to suffer from gun ban propaganda. And it’s not like truth is an antidote for the Trump crowd these days, either. We need to begin embracing what they consider to be a weakness as a strength. Why not start harnessing some intensity among our own base by advocating for more aggressive policies? Let’s move the middle on this issue toour side.

The result will be a win-win for everyone: a more vocal, passionate movement that will push the envelope and make space for the more moderate policies favored by GVP Bigs. And most importantly, we will create a safer America with far less human suffering.

Guess What? The National Movement To End Gun Violence Keeps Growing…And Growing…And Growing.

July 1, 2016

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , , , , Leave a comment

You may recall that back at the beginning of June there was a national outpouring of concern about gun violence known as Gun Violence Awareness Day symbolized by everyone wearing some orange as a symbol of safety around guns.  I wrote a column about the event, or I should say events, because there were more than 200 marches, meetings, concerts and other gatherings all over the United States.  And I pointed out that the growth of this movement reminded me of how demonstrations against the Viet Nam War started small and then mushroomed into something really effective and big.

0616ThankCongressHPWide           Well the same thing seems to be happening now as regards gun violence, thanks to a whole bunch of gun activists who jumped on last week’s sit-in on the floor of the House of Representatives chamber and followed all the Reps back to their home offices so that the energy and desire to do something about gun violence wouldn’t die out.  And at last count, there were close to 100 gun violence prevention events held or planned on June 29th in more than 30 states, with more to come.

Some events were held outside the district office of a House Member, and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that these events focused on Republican members who openly or otherwise supported Speaker Ryan’s calling the sit-in as a ‘publicity stunt.’  Then there were events hosted by Democratic Members, like New York’s Steve Israel, who joined other advocates and activists in a gun-violence roundtable held at the LGBT Center in his district.

All of these gigs were together planned as a ‘National Day of Action,’ which was so widespread that events were even covered by Fox News.  Now let me tell you something, folks.  As you may be aware, Fox is the media arm of the Trump campaign, so anything they let fly about guns is usually designed to appeal to Gun-nut Nation, certainly not to people who are out there trying to do something to end gun craziness in the USA.  And I’m not saying that Fox is about to cozy up to the Gun Violence Prevention community; what I am saying is that the idea that there is now an organized, national effort to challenge the previously-uncontested strength of pro-gun organizations has become major news.

And what’s really important about the National Day of Action is that there’s more to come. A big event is being planned for July 5th to greet Members of Congress as they return from the Independence Day break to get back to work in DC.  The event will be in the form of a ‘Welcome Back’ demonstration at Reagan National Airport coordinated by Brady, Everytown, my good friends at National Cathedral, with more groups to come.

In all the fifty-plus years I have been watching gun violence advocacy, this is the first time that efforts to reduce gun violence are happening on an ongoing basis and on a national stage.  And what gets this event a 5-star rating from me is that many of the demonstrations and gatherings were at offices and other locations of Republican office-holders, which is about the last place that anyone would expect to see someone advocating for more control over guns.  Until this year, when it comes to gun issues, I can guarantee you that someone like Rep. David Young from Iowa or Bob Latta from Ohio never saw anyone who wasn’t from the NRA.

It’s one thing to hold a rally or a demo in a neighborhood or community of an elected representative who wants to do something about the carnage created by guns.  It’s another to show up at an airport or Congressional office in the middle of a district where everyone just ‘loves’ their guns. Preaching to the converted is one thing, making new converts is a much different kind of task.  The groups and individuals who have put together and now sustain this national movement have become adept at doing both. And that’s great!

 

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