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Do We Need More Research On Gun Violence?

October 16, 2013

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coverFollowing Sandy Hook, the Obama Administration took upon itself to organize discussions that ultimately led to the publication of  a new gun research agenda.  Basically this report could be summed up as ‘new wine in old bottles,’ because it called for studies of the same issues that had been on the CDC agenda before gun research was closed down.  I have analyzed this report in my own book and it’s been subject to the usual negative commentary by the minions of the NRA.  And since no funding for any of the suggested research areas has been voted through the Congress, the report remains exactly that: another dead report.

 

But the inactivity of the CDC in this area doesn’t mean that gun violence research isn’t going on.  To the contrary, it continues to be conducted by a number of different organizations and individual researchers, to the point that there’s very little about the issue of gun violence that isn’t understood.  Most of the research has come out of the major advocacy organizations like the Violence Policy Center and the Brady Campaign. Mike Bloomberg has endowed a research program at Johns Hopkins that publishes significant work, as does David Hemenway’s Injury Control Research Center at Harvard’s School of Public Health.

 

This is hardly a comprehensive list of organizations or individuals who are conducting meaningful gun violence research.  And I apologize to the many serious researchers for whom space limitations don’t allow me cite their works.  But I did want to spend a few sentences on a particularly significant research effort being carried out for the past two decades by an emergency room physician in California, Garen Wintemute, because here we have a remarkable example of theory linked to practice by someone who deals with the net results of gun violence every day that he shows up at work.

 

Wintemute’s Violence Prevention Research Program, housed at UC/Davis, has conducted research on a wide variety of issues related to gun violence, but what makes his work so compelling is that it combines extensive analysis of data with hands-on contacts between himself and the subjects of his research: gun owners, gun-show exhibitors, gun dealers, gun manufacturers. He is the only medical or public health specialist I know who has actually verified his data by visiting gun shops, walking through and observing gun shows, walking onto gun factory floors and, it should be added, he’s been a gun owner himself.

 

Recently Wintemute and several colleagues published an article calling for physicians to become more visible advocates in the gun violence debate.  I reviewed this article in a post that I published on September 26.  At that time I was impressed by the fact that an article calling for physicians to get more involved in gun issues was published at all.  But what really stands out is the fact that physicians, despite what the NRA says, can and should play a role in decisions about guns because doctors are experts in dealing with fears about disease and death, and many people decide to own a gun because they have fears about crime.

 

This is the kind of original thinking that comes from analysis that is grounded both in data and real life.  And physicians should realize that no amount of research will convince the NRA or its supporters that medical professionals should and must play an important role in defining America’s relationship to guns.  When the trigger of a gun is pulled and someone’s in the way, it’s physicians like Garen Wintemute who have to deal with the results.  That’s enough of a reason to listen to what he has to say.

 

 

 

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Emily Got Her Gun And Lost Her Mind

October 2, 2013

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Emily Miller

Emily Miller

So now I’ve had a chance to read Emily Gets Her Gun.  It’s actually based on columns that Emily Miller has written over the last several years for the Washington Star.  The book deals with three separate themes:

 

1.  The usual collection of NRA-based bromides on Obama’s not-so-secret plan to disarm America with an assist from Mike Bloomberg and other anti-gun enemies and/or liberals (which is the same thing.)  I’ve shot enough slings and arrows at the NRA that I don’t need to do it here.

 

2.  Interviews with various personalities who have lit up the gun world over the last few years, including politicians, persons wrongly accused of firearm violations, gun shop owners, etc.

 

3.  Miller’s personal odyssey through the bureaucracy that now exists for the purpose of buying and owning a gun in Washington, DC. It’s the last theme that I want to talk about in this blog, because on the one hand it’s pretty well written, on the other, it really exemplifies what’s both wrong and dangerous about the NRA approach to guns.

 

Miller claims that she decided to own a handgun because she was the “victim” of a “home invasion.”  That’s not true.  In fact, she admits that she was outside the house, returning from walking a dog to find a young man “coming from the house.”  A ‘home invasion’ is an event in which someone is within their residence when another person enters the home without permission with the intention of committing a crime.  Emily’s case was a simple B&E (breaking and entering) except there wasn’t even a break-in because Emily left the door unlocked when she took the dog out for a walk.

 

Following this untoward and admittedly scary event, Emily decided to exercise her 2nd Amendment right to purchase and own a gun.  Except she wanted to do more than that because she also wanted to exercise her “Constitutional” right to carry the gun outside her home.  I gave up counting the number of times that Miller categorically states that the Constitution gives her the “right” to carry a concealed weapon outside her home, but she is so adamant about the existence of this “right” that it must be true.

 

But it’s not true.  And why do I have audacity, the temerity to challenge a noted legal scholar like Emily Miller on this fundamental point of constitutional law?  Because there’s a real constitutional scholar out there named Antonin Scalia who also says it’s not true.  And where does he say it’s not true?  In the same District of Columbia vs. Heller decision that gave Emily her right to buy and own a gun in the first place: “Nothing [quoting the decision] in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places.”  In the same section, Scalia states that the 2nd Amendment does not confer unlimited rights, including the right of concealed carry.

 

So for the moment, like it or not, poor Emily is stuck with only being able to protect herself with her gun if an invasion of her home actually takes place.  She better hope that DC doesn’t pass a law prohibiting her from keeping a guard dog in her residence because she’ll be a lot safer with the dog around than with her new gun.  Because what’s missing from her book, given how much it’s being promoted by the NRA, is any indication that she’s planning to engage in any self-defense training at all.  She took a course in gun safety in order to qualify to own a gun, but the truth is that had the course not been required by the DC Police, she wouldn’t have bothered at all.

Less than a quarter of the 50 states require safety courses prior to the first purchase of a gun.  Not a single of the 50 states that now grant concealed-carry privileges requires self-defense firearm training.  Does Emily Miller really believe that with one trip to a shooting range in which she fired 50 rounds that she is ready to confront a home invader or a criminal out in the street with her gun?  If she is, then she’s gotten her gun but he’s lost her mind.

 

 

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The Dumbest Thing Ever Said About Gun Violence – 1st Of Many.

September 29, 2013

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Emily Miller

Emily Miller

I’m going to start giving out an award for the dumbest comment about gun violence.  I’m not yet sure how often I’m going to select a winner and I haven’t yet figured out a prize.  In fact, I invite all the readers of this blog to take the poll following the text to send me their ideas.  In the meantime, the first candidate for our Dumb Award is Emily Miller, a so-called “opinion writer” for the Washington News.  She gets on our list of possible award-winners for her column last week about mass shootings, in which she accused the President of  exploiting the fear of mass shootings to push his gun-control agenda, and noted that mass shooting deaths in America are a “rarity,” accounting for no more than 18 deaths each year.

Where does she get such crazy numbers?  Miller claims she got them from the Congressional Research Service although her link only goes to other Washington Times stories that mention the CRS.  But there is another source for this data, namely, the FBI which publishes something called Supplementary Homicide Reports each year.  Like most crime data, the reports are several years behind, the most recent covering 2011.  So our good friends in Mike Bloomberg’s shop took the FBI data covering 2009 – 2011 and added newspaper accounts covering 2012 and what’s happened so far in 2013.   If I saw a copy of the report then so did Emily Miller.  But you don’t ever mention the name ‘Bloomberg’ in the Washington Times other than to remind your readers that he’s a big clown.  Clown or not, here’s what the Bloomberg report says.

Between January 2009 and the Navy Yard massacre last week, there have been 93 mass shootings, defined by the FBI as events in which 4 or more people were killed.  In calculating the number of victims, incidentally, the FBI did not include the shooters who turned the gun on themselves, nor did they include shooters who were killed by responding police.  I included both categories because, frankly, I don’t see how you could leave them out.  And the grand total of dead people three months short of five years?  498.  Now according to Miller, the total should be slightly less than 90.  It’s not.  It’s 498, which is more than 5 victims per mass shooting.

Of the more than 100 shooters involved in these events (in some mass shootings there were also multiple perpetrators,) there were 25 who took their own lives.  Deducting this number from the overall victim count still leaves more than 470, or more than 90 per year.  And there’s no reason to exclude the 8 mass shooters killed by police because they wouldn’t have been shot if they hadn’t committed a mass murder in the first place.  And here’s the big news: for Emily Miller and the entire NRA gang who go around touting the preposterous idea that an “armed citizenry” will protect us against gun violence, there was not a single mass shooting since 2009 that was thwarted or responded to by a civilian carrying a gun.  Not one.

One other important point needs to be mentioned about mass shootings.  Despite the NRA’s contention that “gun-free zones” (like schools) increase the possibility of shootings, the overwhelming number of mass shootings took place exactly where most gun violence occurs, in or near the home of the victim.  This is true in two-thirds of the mass shootings, and for overall gun violence the percentage is about the same.  And a common thread appears in many of these domestic tragedies; i.e., they happened during holiday celebrations – Thanksgiving, Christmas – which is when lots of people are gathered in the same place.

Know what?  I really wish that Emily Miller wasn’t such an idiot.  I wish her numbers were correct.  If we only suffered 18 mass shooting deaths each year that would probably mean the overall number of deaths from shootings would also be substantially lower than the 11,000 that now occur.   Now

take the poll.

 

 

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The Party’s Over for the Gun Business

September 15, 2013

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Back in July I posted a tongue-in-cheek comment about the correlation between gun sales and arguments about gun control and suggested that the gun control crowd would see a decline in gun sales if they would stop talking about guns.  Guess what?  Smith & Wesson just posted their first-quarter results for the current fiscal year and Mike the Gun Guy turns out to be correct!

Barron’s said it best in reviewing the gun-maker’s results:  “Gun buyers loaded up on weapons in fear of regulations that never materialized. Now, with lower sales in the company’ sights, the stock may fall short.” Which is exactly what happened.  The day after the company’s announcement, the stock dropped 8%.

Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t like to see gun-makers or gun-owners suffer because some nut walks into  school or a theater and starts banging away.  But the economic news from S&W should remind all of us that, NRA public relations aside, gun ownership is still largely dependent on the vagaries of the political climate, rather than reflecting some innate desire on the part of all ‘good’ Americans to own guns.

Don’t forget that our new book is for sale on Amazon.

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Want To Stop Gun Violence? Here’s My Plan

July 29, 2013

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There’s been an unending debate about how to curb gun violence so that we won’t experience more massacres like Sandy Hook.  Whether it’s expanding background checks, or banning hi-cap magazines, or adding mental health data to NICS, there’s no end to the proposals, strategies and  solutions.

But let’s be honest, the truth is that what the gun control folks really want is to get rid of the guns.  Yea, yea, I know that everyone supports the 2nd Amendment.  But the 2nd Amendment’s guarantee of gun ownership is about as important to Michael Bloomberg as the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom is to an atheist.  Not that Bloomberg with his billions or Obama with his press conferences have been able to accomplish anything.  But Mike the Gun Guy has a way they could get rid of all the guns without spending another dollar on campaign contributions or infringing on the 2nd Amendment at all.

Take a look at the monthly NICS totals published by the FBI.  The highest monthly number of NICS background checks ever recorded since the system went live in 1998 was December, 2012, when the FBI phone bank received 2,783,765 calls.  The previous month, November, was the first month that the system ever logged more than 2 million calls. Remember what happened in November, 2012?  Someone named Obama got re-elected.  Recall the date of Sandy Hook?  December 16.

Within a six-week period the most liberal, anti-gun President got to sleep in the White House for another four years, and then a mass killing took place that sparked immediate calls for more gun control.  From January 1 until March 31, NICS received another 7 million background check requests, and from November, 2012 through March 2013, total NICS calls almost hit 12 million. No wonder Smith & Wesson announced record revenues for the quarter ending April 30.

But a funny thing began to happen as the gun industry marched along. In May, following the defeat of Manchin-Toomey and other gun control schemes, NICS checks fell to 1,435,917 and in June dropped even further to 1,281,351. The June figure was the lowest since July 2011, and from what I hear and what I see in my shop, the figure for July will be lower still. In other words, since the high-point of last December, the drop is more than fifty percent!  Please don’t post a comment about how NICS numbers can’t be trusted because so many guns can be sold without a background check.  NICS obviously doesn’t cover all transactions, but it does cover virtually every new gun sold for the first time.  So the NICS number may not be absolutely correct, but it’s a very good gauge for understanding sales trends in the gun industry.

If the decline in NICS continues, the FBI will conduct less than a million monthly background checks within the next several months, and by year’s end we could be back down to the pre-9/11 days of George W. Bush.  Boom and bust is typical of the gun industry because spikes in sales are invariably the result of gun owners believing they won’t be able to buy more guns, rather than consumers entering the gun market for the first time.  Surveys seem to indicate that the number of households with guns keeps declining, while the number of guns owned by Americans keeps increasing.  Get it?

Gun sales have doubled from 2006 to 2012, but what the gun control crew should do to reduce the number of guns coming onto the market is to keep their mouths shut.  No more Dianne Feinstein press conferences, no more Michael Bloomberg “straw sales” videos, no more Joe Biden playing Joe Biden.  If gun owners stop worrying about “attacks” on the 2nd Amendment, they’ll stop buying guns.  Less guns out there, less guns get into the wrong hands.  The market can be a much more efficient way to regulate gun behavior than any government plan.

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