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Why Do More Kids Die from Guns Than from Cars?

November 2, 2023

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 2 Comments

              Every year the numbers come out and every year the numbers show that more young people are killed with guns than with cars. And every year when these numbers come out, we get the same experts telling us that we made cars safer, so we should be able to make guns safer as well.

              How will we make guns safer? Well, we can start by always locking the gun up or locking it away.

              This brilliant idea would be like making sure that you never have a car accident by leaving your car in the driveway and always taking the bus.

              Know the percentage of gun deaths suffered by kids under fourteen?  Try 1.1%. Fourteen happens to be the age when every state issues hunting licenses, so when it comes to guns, anyone fourteen and above is presumed to know how to keep from shooting themselves or shooting someone else.

              Another clever idea being promoted by ‘let’s do with guns what we do with cars’ is licensing gun ownership the way we require a license in order to drive a car. The state which has the most rigorous licensing system happens to be the state where I live – Massachusetts – which implemented a very comprehensive licensing system for gun purchases back in 1999 and is often cited as a case in point when the idea that licensing makes guns safer rears its head.

              In fact, Massachusetts does have the lowest or next-to-lowest gun violence rate of all 50 states. Except there’s only one little wrinkle with that number, namely, that gun violence in Massachusetts was even lower before the current law was passed in 1999.

              That’s right.  In 1998, Massachusetts had a gun violence rate of 2.88.  In 2021 the rate was 3.35.  That’s only an increase of 16% since the present-day licensing procedure in Massachusetts went into effect.

              What the hell. What’s the big deal about 50 more lost lives, right?

              The point is that you can’t make a consumer product ‘safe’ when the whole purpose of that product, both its design and function, is to be used in an unsafe way. And if we use the word ‘unsafe’ to mean injuring or killing a human being, then the guns which are used to cause most of the 100,000 homicides and aggravated assaults committed every year with guns cannot be discussed in terms of safety. It just doesn’t work.

              To go back to the issue of car safety again, the whole purpose of a car is to get you from here to there. If an accident occurs along the way, then either the car isn’t working properly, or the driver screwed up. So you figure out which was which and either change the car’s design or teach the driver how to drive.

              But if I walk into a room where a bunch of people are sitting around, pull out my Glock 17 pistol, I could kill or injure 20 men and women in 30 seconds or less and the gun will be functioning exactly the way it was designed to be used.

              You don’t use a gun designed for tactical purposes to shoot a bird out of a tree or pop Bambi in the ass. We are the only country in the entire world which allows residents to buy and carry around guns which have no purpose other than to end human life. If ending human life by using a gun is what we call ‘gun violence,’ gee, what a surprise that we experience an endemic epidemic of gun violence every year.

              Want to get rid of gun violence? It’s very simple. Just get rid of the guns which are designed to be used to commit violence, a word defined by the World Health Organization as the intentional attempt too injure yourself or someone else.

              And by the way, before you start unctuously lecturing me on the 2nd Amendment, there is absolutely nothing in that 26-word text which prevents government from deciding exactly what kinds of guns Americans can own, as long as they can own at least one gun. If you don’t believe me, just go back and read up on the case in Connecticut where both state and federal courts decided that the AR-15 was too dangerous to be sold.

              And since I helped the law firm which represented the Sandy Hook parents write the section of that lawsuit which explained why the design of the AR-15 made the product unsafe, I know what I’m talking about.

How Come The Assault-Rifle Ban In California Was Overturned?

July 2, 2021

mikethegunguy Blogs , 6 Comments

Just under a month ago, Judge Robert Benitez overturned California’s assault weapon ban, a ruling greeted with hosannas from the mountaintops of Gun-nut Nation, and with equally-loud expressions of dismay and anger from the gun-control side. The judge called the 1989 ban a ‘failed experiment’ because the prohibition did not do what it was supposed to do, namely, protect California residents from the threat to public safety allegedly represented by that type of gun.

To the contrary, Judge Benitez found that the ‘modern sporting rifle,’ or AR-15, had become a favored consumer product for self-defense. Moreover, from testimony and briefs presented at the trial, if anything, the AR-15 was a better and more reliable self-defense weapon than a handgun. And since the Heller decision recognizes the ‘right’ of citizens to keep self-defense weapons in their homes, the California assault-rifle ban needed to be shut down.

How did our friends in Gun-control Nation respond? By doing what they usually do, which was to attack the credibility and the testimony of the pro-gun witnesses, leading off with the ‘mis-information’ provided to the District Court by the hated John Lott. So, for example, Devin Hughes backs up his criticism of Lott’s ‘mis-information’ by citing data which shows that California had the 7th-lowest rate of gun deaths in 2020.

There’s only one little problem.  Hughes got this ‘data’ from Giffords, which based its ranking of California’s gun-death rate on all causes of gun deaths, not just deaths from gun assaults. The moment you pull gun suicides out of the overall number of gun deaths, California becomes the 28th highest of all 50 states.  And there’s no discussion at all about suicides and assault rifles in the California case. Who’s mis-informing who (or whom?)

What bothers me about the reaction of Gun-control Nation to the Benitez decision is that it’s a perfect example of what the gun-control community gets wrong whenever it attempts to either promote more regulations of guns (i.e., an assault-weapons ban) or tries to block an attempt by the other side to make it easier for people to buy, own and use guns. What Gun-control Nation gets wrong again and again, is that you don’t regulate an industry when your knowledge of that industry and its products add up to zilch.

The stupidest section of the Benitez decision (Section III, A, 1) was where the Judge ran through a whole series of examples to ‘prove’ that the ‘prohibited features’ on the AR-15 (adjustable stock, handgrip, etc.) makes the gun a much more effective weapon for home defense than a pistol or a shotgun, the usual weapons that people keep around their homes for self-defense.

So what if the hand grip makes it easier for someone defending their home because they only need to hold the gun with one hand? So what if an adjustable stock makes it easier to keep the gun’s recoil under control? The whole point about the AR-15, which not one so-called ‘expert’ for the State of California pointed out, was that the AR-15 wasn’t designed to be a ‘sporting’ gun. It was designed to do one thing and one thing only; namely, to end human life.

And not just to end one human life. The kid who broke his way into the Sandy Hook school in 2012 needed less than 5 minutes to shoot and kill 26 adults and children, and much of that time was spent moving from room to room. In the slightly less than 3 minutes that he actually used the gun, he fired off more than 90 rounds. That’s a sporting gun?

Until and unless my friends in Gun-control Nation start learning something about the industry and the products produced by that industry that they want to regulate in more effective ways, they will continue to find themselves losing legal arguments to the Gun-nut gang. Would the SEC roll out a new regulation without first running it past people who actually work in Wall Street firms?

What Is An Assault Rifle?: Weisser, Michael R.: 9798728410980: Amazon.com: Books

There He Goes Again. Biden Makes Another ‘Mistake’ About Guns.

February 26, 2020

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Last night Joe made a comment about gun violence that is buzzing all over the internet and once again being taken to prove that maybe our boy Biden just can’t keep from saying ridiculous things. Joe criticized Bern for voting in favor of the 2005 PLCCA law which protects gun makers from torts, asserting that more than 150 million Americans had died from gun injuries since 2007. Biden’s campaign quickly covered up this silly gaff with his PR folks issuing a statement which brought the gun-death number down to 150 thousand, not million.

Actually, the number of gun deaths since 2007 through 2018 is 413,403, which will probably increase by another 70,000 or so if we could count right up to today. Now in fact, while 400,000+ deaths is nothing to sneeze at, it’s not 150,000.  On the other hand, the category of gun injuries would rank it as the 11th leading cause of death in the United State, just below suicide, except that half of that suicide total also happens to have been caused by using guns. Which puts gun deaths into the Top 10 of all deaths. 

This exchange between Bernie and Joe reminds me of another gun-comment that Joe made at a 2013 White House meeting of video-game executives when he said that not only did he have no problem with people keeping guns in their home for self-defense, but in fact his wife Jill had access to a shotgun in their Delaware home which she kept handy to protect herself and the kids when Joe was on the road.

For the very first time a national politician openly supported the idea of using a gun for self-defense. And Joe made it clear that if Jill heard something which sounded like someone was trying to break into their home, here’s what he  expected her to do: “`Jill, if there’s ever a problem, just walk out on the balcony … take that double-barrel shotgun and fire two blasts outside the house,”‘ Biden said. “You don’t need an AR-15. It’s harder to aim, it’s harder to use and in fact, you don’t need 30 rounds to protect yourself.”

When I read Joe’s comment, I couldn’t believe that a national political figure could speak about guns in such a rational and reasonable way. Had I been the owner of Mossberg, Remington or one of the other companies that makes shotguns, I would have immediately packed up one of our guns, run to Joe’s office and presented the gun to him on behalf of both the gun industry and all gun-owning Americans.

Nothing of the sort occurred at all. To the contrary, Joe was lambasted by just about every hot-air balloon who speaks for Gun-nut Nation in the gun debate. Mike Huckabee got on Fox News and told his audience that two rounds from a shotgun wouldn’t be enough ammunition to protect yourself from an intruder who had a gun with more ammunition in the mag. I suspect that even Huckabee had trouble maintaining his TV composure while saying something so dumb.

You know going forward that no matter who heads the Democratic ticket, the gun ‘issue’ will be front and center during the 2020 national campaign. Which is all fine and well except I suspect that neither candidate, Trump versus whomever, will say anything as remotely logical and honest as what Joe said back in 2013.

No matter whether he’s talking about immigration, or the economy or anything else, what Trump has managed to accomplish in less than four years is to take all political rhetoric and all political debates to the extreme. Which is where the gun debate has always been, but now every other topic appears to be catching up.

If Trump said that 150 million Americans had died from gun injuries over the last twelve years, nobody on his staff would bother to correct him at all. Maybe it’s time for the Democrats to stop worrying about Joe’s gaffes and realize that the overblown rhetoric used in the gun debate has become the accepted verbal currency for every political exchange.

Greg Gibson: Stop The Gun.

September 5, 2019

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Our son Galen was killed in a school shooting in 1992. In the aftermath of shootings like the ones that have taken place recently in Texas and Ohio, and then in Texas again, friends still send emails and texts. They can imagine the pain such incidents evoke, and they want us to know that they’re thinking about us.

 As much as we appreciate these expressions of love and support, and as important as they’ve been to our survival, they’re somewhat off the mark by now. Mass shootings no longer re-awaken the trauma and pain that accompanied Galen’s senseless murder. The fact is, my family doesn’t follow the reports of these incidents very closely. My wife and daughter spend time with friends on social media. My son and I are addicted to what sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy once referred to as Moron Sports Talk Radio. A survival tactic, no doubt.

 When I do turn my attention to reports of mass shootings, I’ve begun to notice a formulaic aspect to way this news is delivered. Reports are likely to feature the 911 call, squad cars and SWAT teams responding, smartphone footage recorded during seconds or minutes of mortal terror, traumatized survivors weeping and hugging, and ambulances wheeling away. The perpetrator, of course, is of interest. Sometimes we even get a mug shot of the crazed young man. We desperately need to know, and we will never know, Why did he do it? If we could figure that out, we think, we might be able to prevent the next one from happening. So we read on. Mass shootings account for only about 2% of gun deaths each year, and yet they suck up a far greater percentage of our attention.

 Without our even being aware of it, we’ve entered into a sort of symbiotic relationship with the phenomenon of mass shootings. The news media commodify reports of these horrific events as “content” and we unwittingly consume this content along with the rest of the news. Not because we need more data in our tireless quest to end gun violence, but because these reports feed our news habit.

 We know that mass shootings have become creepy memes that morph and evolve on the basis of information gathered from prior shootings. Yet we continue to make that information available – in mind-boggling abundance – to the next wave of racists and madmen. I understand that there is not a conscious conspiracy between the news media and the forces of evil. But I do believe the time has come to take a hard look at the role the media play in this problem.

 It’s clear by now that cultural change will be an important factor in reducing gun violence. It’s equally clear that, as much as reporters rely on cultural activity to create content, the content they create helps shape the culture upon which they report.

 Why do we not hear more about the destructive effects of gun violence – 100 deaths each day – on families and communities, particularly among people of color? Where is the reporting on the devastation that trails in the wake of suicide with firearms by teens, vets, and law enforcement officers – which has risen by 30% since 2013? Why do we not hear more about the link between ownership of firearms and domestic violence?

 In my experience, people who are affected on a daily basis by gun violence – people of color who live in specific, socially isolated areas in almost any big city – hardly ever ask why? They’re more interested in how. Ruth Rollins, one of the founding members of Boston’s Operation LIPSTICK told me that when someone is killed in her neighborhood the first thing people want to know is where the gun came from? How did it get into the shooter’s hands? She said, “If you stop that gun you stop a shooting.”

 We need to dispense with the 911 tapes, the second-by-second descriptions of the carnage, the postmortem psychological profiling, and the gnashing of teeth over warning signs disregarded.

 Let’s talk instead about what kind of gun did what kind of damage. We need solid reporting on how the shooter got his hands on the weapons he used, and where they came from. It’s as true in your town as it is on the streets of Roxbury, Massachusetts or El Paso, Texas.

 You stop that gun and you stop a shooting.

Want To Understand Gun Violence? Try Using Your Gmail Account.

July 17, 2019

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Our friends at the Gun Violence Archive have been tracking gun violence since 2014, and their data is often cited by news agencies, researchers and advocacy groups. The problem with what they publish, however, and it’s not their fault by any means, is that as an open source aggregator, GVA‘s data is more a reflection of how and why the media covers gun violence than as a comprehensive picture of what is going on. 

To begin with, and again this is a problem which the GVA admits to as well, suicides, even suicides committed with guns, rarely make news. Unintentional shootings are also events which never attract any public concern unless it’s when the four-year old grabs the gun and shoots the older sister in the head. Finally, intentional shootings where the victim survives are undercounted by as much as half, again a function of media coverage which open-source aggregators are unable to overcome.

I have created my own little GVA version by simply going into my Gmail account and setting alerts for the following terms: ‘shootings,’ ‘gun violence’ and ‘guns.’ Every day those three alerts generate thirty or more links to internet-based media stories, many of which also end up being sourced by the GVA.  Much in the same way as many people start their mornings off with a cup of coffee and a newspaper or other source for news, I begin my day with coffee and those Gmail alerts.

I would estimate that over the last five years (I started reading the Gmail alerts at some point in 2014) I have read or at least scanned 30,000 media sources related to the violence caused by guns. And if anyone reading this column decides to send me a snarky email about how ‘it’s not the guns that cause the violence, it’s the people using the guns,’ do me a favor and save your time and mine, okay? I made an executive decision last week to stop replying to any email that scores higher than five on what Al Franken calls the dumbness scale, and that message earns a ten.

The reason I read these alerts is because I have always felt uncomfortable whenever my gun-research friends in public health describe what they are doing as creating an ‘epidemiology’ of gun violence. The CDC defines epidemiology as the “study of distribution and determinants of health-related states among specified populations and the application of that study to the control of health problems.” But gun violence is a very special problem because with the exception of gun-suicide and accidental shooting, every other gun injury is caused by someone other than the person who gets hurt. So the fact that our data on gun injuries gives us detailed information about the person who got shot, doesn’t tell us very much about the individual who pulled the trigger and committed the crime. And make no mistake about it, more than 75% of all gun injuries happen to be crimes.

Thanks to  FBI-UCR data, we know where and how these crimes occur, and we also know whether the shooter and the victim had some degree of contact before the event. So we know the what, the who and the where of gun violence, but we don’t know the why. More than one and one-half million violent assaults take place every year but guns are involved in less than one hundred thousand of these events. How come more than 90 percent of the people who want to really hurt someone else do it without using a gun? The answer to that question is what epidemiological research should provide.

My public health researcher friends might consider spending a little less time gathering data and a little more time actually reading descriptions of how people get shot. After all, when it comes to something as complicated as violence, the devil has to be found in the details, right?

Tom Gabor: It’s The Guns, Stupid

June 4, 2018

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America is an enormous outlier, relative to other high-income countries, both in terms of its gun ownership levels and its rates of gun mortality.  We have about one gun for every man, woman, and child in the US —about 300 million in all.[1]  No other country has a civilian arsenal that approximates this number.  At the same time, we have 25 times the gun homicide rate when compared to the combined (aggregated) rate for 23 other advanced countries.[2]  We are global leaders in women and children murdered with guns, mass shootings, and school shootings.

shows The obvious interpretation for America’s “exceptional” status as a leader in gun homicide and mortality is its exceptionally high level of gun ownership and widespread access of citizens to guns.  However, gun rights advocates take issue with this interpretation and argue that America’s high rates of gun violence and mass shootings are due to its exceptionally high rates of overall violence, mental illness, and even violent videos.  In fact, the US is around average in its overall violence levels and does not stand out with regard to its rates of mental illness.[3]  Countries like Japan, South Korea, and the UK, each of which have a fraction of America’s gun violence death rates, spend more per capita on violent videos.

To illustrate how a segment of society will contort itself to avoid attributing gun violence to the vast civilian arsenal in this country, consider Tennessee gubernatorial candidate Diane Black’s claim that pornography is responsible for America’s “exceptional” level of mass shootings.  This statement is utterly absurd and displays the challenges of trying to have a reasonable, evidence-based discussion on gun policy with some conservatives.  What’s really pornographic is the continuing refusal of many political conservatives to yield an inch on policy in order to prevent the slaughter of children and other residents of this country.

Unintentional (accidental) shootings illustrate how gun violence and mortality are closely linked to the number of guns in an area, state, or country.  Unlike intentional shootings, one cannot plausibly attribute these shootings to a more violent culture, mental illness, or violent videos because they are by definition unintentional.  Nor can one make the argument, as if often made in relation to gun homicide and gun suicide, that in the absence of guns people will merely substitute another method to kill another or oneself.  This argument does not apply where there is no intention to harm others or oneself.

Therefore, the examination of unintentional shootings provides a good test as to the role of gun availability in firearm-related deaths.  If there are more accidental shootings where there are more guns, there are few conclusions one can draw other than the obvious one:  more guns equal more gun deaths.

When we compare Japan and the USA, the impact of the difference in the prevalence of firearms is striking. The US has about two and a half times Japan’s population. However, according

to the most recent data available, the USA has over 120 times Japan’s number of unintentional gun deaths.  Adjusting for population differences, the USA has about 45 times more unintentional gun deaths than does Japan (2.7 vs. .06 deaths per million people). This is an astounding difference. Is this due to the enormous disparity in gun ownership or are Americans just much more accident prone and careless with guns than the Japanese?

The USA has about 88 times the rate of gun owners per million people as Japan. Recent surveys show that in the USA about 22 % of the population are gun owners; whereas, in Japan, there are about 2.5 licensed gun owners for every 1000 people, well under 1 % of the population.  Are Americans more prone to gun accidents due to carelessness or other factors? I calculated the fraction of gun owners who die from a gun accident and found that in Japan there is approximately one fatality for every 42,000 gun owners. In the US, there is an unintentional gun fatality for every 81,000 gun owners, illustrating that the average American gun owner is less likely to die of an accidental shooting than his counterpart in Japan.  Thus, US owners are not more accident prone and the massive gap between the two countries in fatal gun accidents is very likely due simply to the much higher level of gun ownership in the USA. This is the case because the number of these fatalities is far higher—45 times higher adjusting for population differences—in the USA despite the fact that the average Japanese gun owner is about two times as likely to be the victim of a fatal gun accident.

Researchers in the US support the idea that accidental gun deaths are simply a numbers game.  Harvard researchers examined the link between gun availability and state unintentional gun death rates over a 19-year period. For every age group, states with more guns tend to have more accidental gun deaths than states with fewer guns. The death rate was seven times higher in the four states with the most guns compared to the four states with the fewest guns.[4]   Douglas Wiebe of UCLA, using national data, found that the relative risk of death by an unintentional gunshot injury was nearly four times greater for subjects living in homes with guns than those living in homes without guns.[5]

In his book Lethal Logic, attorney Dennis Henigan recounts the story from his childhood of a neighbor who was shot accidentally by her husband while he was cleaning his handgun at the kitchen table. It is an obvious truth that people are rarely killed during the cleaning of knives, baseball bats, or other potential weapons.   Henigan explains that, apart from their greater lethality, guns are more susceptible to accidentally injuring the user or others because they are more complex than these other weapons.  For example, accidents often occur because people, often children, are unaware that a gun is real or loaded. In other cases, a gun discharges after it has been dropped. In still other cases, hunting accidents are enabled by the long range of rifles and shotguns as people are mistaken for game.  Henigan notes that Americans are six times more likely to die from an accidental firearm discharge than from an accident involving a knife or other sharp object.  This is the case despite the fact that knives are present in far more homes, are greater in number, and are used more frequently than are guns.

 The most obvious explanation for high levels of gun violence is a high level of gun ownership.  From the gun lobby and gun rights advocates, we get many convoluted alternative explanations as they try to find every conceivable reason for America’s unacceptable levels of gun mortality other than the most obvious one:  we are a nation awash with guns.

Thomas Gabor, Ph.D., is a criminologist, sociologist, and author of Confronting Gun Violence in America.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2016/01/05/462017461/guns-in-america-by-the-numbers

[2] https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(15)01030-X/abstract

[3] http://fortune.com/2017/11/07/texas-church-shooting-donald-trump-mental-health/

[4] Miller M, Azrael D, Hemenway D. Firearm availability and unintentional

firearm deaths. Accid Anal Prev. 2001; 33(4): 477–484.

[5] Wiebe D. Firearms in US homes as a risk factor for unintentional gunshot

fatality. Accid Anal Prev. 2003; 35(5): 711–716.

What’s The Difference Between Accidental And Non-Accidental Shootings? No Difference.

September 26, 2017

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When I entered graduate school in 1967, the very first book I purchased was a big, fat compendium known as the Chicago Manual of Style. It was published by The University of Chicago Press and was considered the non-plus-ultra guide to anything having to do with writing or editing scholarly and non-fiction articles and books. And since I was studying economic history, I was going to be writing lots of academic papers which needed to meet the standard for how to do footnotes, end notes, quotations, references and all that other bothersome stuff which writers of academic works need to pretend they understand.
kids and gunsOf course in 1967 there was no internet, for that matter there were no such things as word processors and I don’t recall even putting my fingers on the keyboard of an IBM Selectric typewriter until 1970 or 1971 (although I had actually seen one a few years prior to that date.) Because I come from the Stone Age in terms of communication technologies and skills, I don’t take for granted the degree to which so much of what I had to do by hand when I first started writing is now done online. And one of those online resources which helps me and countless other writers and bloggers get things done in an efficient and orderly way is the AP Stylebook which is an extremely useful reference work containing definitions, topics, themes and other information to be used when an event or an issue has to be quickly understood and described. I just clicked on the topic – hurricanes – and up came a whole list of definitions for every type of tropical storm, the name and address of various federal agencies that deal with hurricane relief, and so on.

The AP Stylebook stays up to date by giving users an opportunity to suggest either new topics and/or content which should be added or revised. In this way, writers who are covering topical events can feel confident that if they utilize a resource from the Stylebook it will reflect the most recent way in which that issue is described or understood. One of our good GVP friends, Ladd Everitt, has just initiated a campaign through his organization, One Pulse for America, to have the Stylebook revise its definition of an ‘accidental’ shooting because, as Ladd says, “’Accidental’ implies that nothing can be done to prevent such shootings, when nothing is further from the truth.” Most accidental shootings, as Ladd points out, occur either because of negligence (the gun was left unsecured) or the owner was acting like a dope. The AP Stylebook team responded by saying they would consider changing the description of ‘accidental shootings’ when a new edition appears next year.

There is no question that referring to unintentional injuries caused by guns as ‘accidents’ gives a misleading impression about whether or not anyone should be blamed when a gun goes off when it’s not supposed to go off. But I also think that making a clear distinction between accidental, as opposed to non-accidental gun injuries can create its own misleading impression for what gun violence is really all about.
Lester Adelson was the coroner for Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) nearly 40 years, during which time he saw thousands of individuals who were killed with guns. In 1992 he published a summary article on gun violence, “The gun and the sanctity of human life; or The bullet as pathogen” which for me, ranks as the single most incisive and profound work ever published on this issue, and you can download it here. Here’s what Adelson says is the most salient feature of gun violence: “With its particular lethality, a gun converts a spat into a slaying and a quarrel into a killing.”

Does it really matter if the gun is used intentionally or not? To quote the novelist Walter Mosley, “If you walk around with a gun it will go off sooner or later.”

Is Gun Violence Endemic Or Epidemic? It’s Both.

July 5, 2017

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So far this year our friends at the Gun Violence Archive are posting 7,821 deaths from guns. Which means that if the rate of gun deaths continues for the remainder of 2017, this year will end up seeing an increase in gun deaths over last year of around 15 percent, and an increase since 2014 of nearly 25 percent.

urban            I thought that gun deaths were going down because all law-abiding citizens are walking around with guns. Or at least they should be walking around with guns if you agree with the NRA. After all, the gun industry has been bragging about the ‘decline’ in violent crime at the same time that so many Americans are buying guns. Since the early 90’s, according to the NSSF, “homicides, other crimes, and accidents involving firearms have decreased dramatically,”

Actually, this dramatic decrease in gun violence more or less ended around 2000, then went up a bit, went down a bit, but now seems to be moving quickly upwards again. And don’t make the mistake of believing that this is just Chicago’s problem, even though the jerk in the White House keeps saying he’s going to send the troops into the Windy City to help Rahm out.  In fact, homicides in Chicago appear to be down by roughly 15% so far this year; too many lives are still being lost but we’ll take every bit of progress we can get.

Cities like St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans and Cleveland rank far ahead of Chicago for murder rates, Newark and Memphis are also more dangerous cities in which to live. Guns and gun violence are so endemic in many locations that the IPO of Shotspotter, whose technology tells the cops where guns are being shot off, jumped 26% as soon as shares went public, a sure sign that the violent use of guns isn’t going to disappear.

What appears to be happening in gun violence is what a brilliant physician and public health researcher, Katherine Kaufer Christoffel, wrote about in 2007 when she analyzed a shift in gun violence from ‘epidemic’ to ‘endemic’ rates. I happen to think that Dr. Christoffel’s article is one of the most important and informative contributions to the public health literature on gun violence and you can download it here. What she argues is that gun violence quickly spiked and then just as quickly declined between the late 1980’s and the early 1990’s because it was perceived as an ‘epidemic’ and treated as an emergency through a combination of local policing and health initiatives, coordination between stakeholding agencies and national legislation (e.g., the Brady bill.)

The result of these efforts, which also paralleled an overall decrease in violent crime, was that gun violence rates fell back to where they had been in the early 1980’s, but have since then remained steady and, in the last several years, started to go back up. But the transition from epidemic to endemic gun violence doesn’t mean that a fundamental ‘cure’ for the problem has been found. To the contrary, the problem with endemic public health conditions, as Dr. Christoffel points out, is that not only do they result in much suffering within the populations where the problem still exists, but they can ‘flare up’ as epidemics from place to place and time to time.

What we are witnessing in cities like St. Louis, Baltimore and Detroit are exactly the return of an epidemic of gun violence which grows out of an endemic condition that has stabilized nationally but has never really been brought under control. In 1993, there were just under 40,000 gun deaths (homicide, suicide, accidents) which set a national gun-violence rate of 15.4. If the year-to-year increase continues at the recent rate, we could exceed the 1993 gun violence numbers within the next two or three years.

I hate to say it but it needs to be said: A lot more people may have to get killed or injured before something that really reduces gun violence ever gets done.

 

Doctors For Responsible Gun Ownership Show How Irresponsible They Really Are.

December 23, 2016

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Yesterday the medical quacks who run a website called Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership (DRGO) decided to demonize physicians who regard gun ownership as a health risk by descending to the lowest, possible level of pandering to the lowest, intellectual denominator – a style promoted successfully by our soon-to-be President which now serves as the rhetorical burnishing for the thoughts of every jerk, dope and creep climbing out from underneath their rock to bask in the light of the Age of Trump.

docs versus glocks             What I am referring to is a scurrilous attack on an up-and-coming public health researcher, Bindu Kalesan, whose group continues to publish articles on guns and gun violence that really pisses Gun-nut Nation off.  And the reason their work attracts such negative attention from the Jerks and Dopes Brigade is because Dr. Kalesan and her colleagues make no secret of the fact that they are not enamored of guns.  Kalesan even comes down out of the Ivory Tower to serve as the Vice President of a neat GVP organization which attempts to “assist in the funding required to promote mental and emotional healing” of gun victims, something which the medical quacks who slither around the DRGO website know and care absolutely nothing about.

What got the so-called physicians who spearhead the Jerks and Dopes Brigade so hot and bothered was an article published in a peer-reviewed medical research journal that correlated school shootings with such factors as handgun background checks, state-level mental health expenditures, education funding and gun-ownership rates, among others. By the way, the DRGO claims that this is the first of a series of articles that will be produced by the DRGO Publication Review team which consists of ‘medical scientists and statisticians,’ although none of these august individuals is actually identified by name.

And to show you DRGO’s commitment to medicine and science, the first thing that caught my eye was their finding of a major error in Kalesan’s piece, namely, that she neglected to mention a school shooting which occurred in Boston on April 18, 2013.  Now if you want to characterize this event as a ‘school shooting’ you are either delusional or dumb, or both.  Because this happened to have been a shooting of a campus cop at MIT by the two Tsarnaev brothers (the Marathon Bombers) who were trying to evade a citywide manhunt and might have been stopped by the cop after their pictures were broadcast all over the place by the FBI. If this purposeful misuse of evidence constitutes what the DRGO feels represents the work of statisticians and scientists on their behalf, then there’s really no sense in taking them seriously at all.

But the misrepresentation of evidence is not the lowest degree to which this bunch of fools can sink; in fact, they go one step further (or perhaps I should say ‘lower’) in their attempt to guttersnipe at Kalesan’s work and name.  Because they also turn their attention to the journal in which this article was published – Injury Prevention – and note that the editorial staff is “dominated by foreigners unfamiliar with and likely hostile to America’s constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”  Note the use of the word ‘foreigners,’ and it’s not by accident that this comment is placed in an attack on a researcher who, by dint of her name, might also be part of the horde that’s coming over here to destroy everything about America that’s good and right.

This is what I meant above when I talked about how disgustingly low the DRGO creeps have sunk.  It’s not bad enough that they use their so-called medical credentials to spread absolute falsehoods about the non-risk from guns.  What they are now beginning to do is resort to the same, malicious and dangerous racism and hatreds which infected the Presidential campaign.  In the process they not only demonize evidence-based research upon which all medical knowledge and practice depends, but show themselves to be nothing more than crude hucksters for the gun industry hiding behind medical degrees.

What Do The Gun Violence Numbers Really Tell Us? That Gun Violence Is Much Worse Than We Think.

May 29, 2016

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. Earlier this year our friends at the Violence Policy Center published a report which showed that gun deaths were now outpacing motor vehicle deaths in 14 states, and if the trend continued, gun deaths would soon exceed car deaths throughout the entire United States. I think the comparison of automobile deaths to gun deaths, a basic GVP argument for why we need to curb gun violence, understates the real level of gun violence to a tremendous degree.  And this is because it doesn‘t take into account what Dennis Henigan, in a new book to be published in August, calls “exposure to risk.” Because the truth is that a gun only becomes a risk when it gets into someone’s hands.  And many of the 300 million civilian-owned small arms in America are rarely, if ever picked up at all.

conference-program-pic          Let’s play with some numbers. The average American sits in an automobile roughly 100 minutes every day and will drive 800,000 miles over the course of a life (thanks for the info, JM.)  The “average” American doesn’t actually own a gun, and of those who do, many are used occasionally for hunting or even less occasionally for target and shooting sports.  Gun Nation can jump for joy over the fact that millions of Americans have concealed-carry permits, but I notice that neither the NRA nor the NSSF has ever done a survey to find out how many of those folks with CCW licenses are actually walking around with a gun. For all the talk about how armed citizens are our first line of defense against the ‘bad guys,’ the FBI could find exactly one instance where a civilian armed with a gun actually intervened in an ‘active’ (multiple victims) shooting between 2000 and 2013.

So let’s do the numbers again and put our benchmark for auto deaths and gun deaths at 30,000, even though it’s slightly more for both.  What this turns into when we calculate the rate of motor vehicle fatalities versus gun fatalities is 10 per 100,000 for the cars, 33 per 100,000 for the guns. Of course Gun Nation will immediately scream that the numbers are manipulated (their current favorite ad hominem about Katie Couric’s brilliant documentary) because it’s the ‘bad guys, the ‘street thugs,’ the ‘wackos’ who do all the killing with guns.

But there’s just one little problem with this point of view.  Like just about everything that the pro-gun noise machine says to bolster gun sales, it’s simply not true. Two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides, and most, if not nearly all gun homicides involve people who know each other and can’t settle a dispute in more non-violent ways, and this is certainly the case in virtually every instance where a gun is yanked out during a domestic dispute which between 2010 and 2014 killed nearly 23,000 women and teenage girls.

Every single gun that is used to hurt someone, anyone, started out as the property of a legal gun owner.  Maybe they didn’t pull the trigger, but nobody would have been able to pull the trigger if the gun hadn’t gotten into the wrong hands. And that was the fault of the person who initially bought the gun. So I think it’s time for GVP-land to stop being so solicitous of all those legal gun owners who tell you that the problem of gun violence has nothing to do with them.  It has everything to do with them because absent their desire to own guns, the issue of gun violence wouldn’t exist.

And don’t get me wrong.  I went out today and bought a gun and I’m sure that over the next few months I’ll buy a couple more.  But what I won’t do is delude myself into thinking that some 2nd-Amendment, BS ‘right’ is being threatened because Hillary wants me to undergo a background check before I take possession of that little Glock.

Hoping that everyone has a safe and happy holiday.

 

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