Home

Thanks To The Government, We Finally Have Some Good Numbers About Gun Violence

November 7, 2013

mikethegunguy Guns, Health , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Coalition to Stop Gun Violence

Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of the major issues in dealing with gun violence is that the data seems to fly all over the map.  And if you don’t have reliable data then it’s pretty tough to develop a solid strategy for dealing with the problem. Of course you can always deal with this by saying that there is no problem.  But let’s leave the loonies to talk (or yell) among themselves.  For the rest of us, who believe that we try to make evidence-based decisions, if there ain’t good evidence there ain’t a decision.But this may have changed this week with the release by the American Public Health Association of a report that analyzes firearm injuries from 2003 to 2010, using national data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which is a branch of HHS. The study aggregated data from virtually every hospital in the United States, or at least every hospital that is connected to the government through HHS-administered programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans, etc.  In other words, virtually every hospital. And the injury data, drawn from hospital admissions, was coded to pick up just about every type of primary or secondary diagnosis that could have been the result of a gun injury.  The bottom line is this: If this data ain’t complete, there ain’t no complete.

One caveat before I talk about the actual findings:  the data on hospitalizations seriously undercounts the actual level of gun violence because it does not cover ER visits, but only hospital admissions. We can assume that most people who came to the ER with a gunshot wound probably ended up staying in the hospital, but the Department of Justice data on gun violence, which comes from the FBI (which comes from state and local law enforcement) doesn’t break gun injuries out of the much larger category of gun violence, which means any criminal incident in which a gun was involved,whether someone was shot or not.  And of course the hospital data completely undercounts homicides, because even though slightly less than ten percent of hospital admissions resulted in death during the admission period, we can assume that almost all homicides and certainly all suicides were taken not to a hospital or an ER, but to the morgue.

Given the caveats above, the findings of this report still require serious thought and consideration.  First and most important is the fact that of the more than 250,000 gun injuries between 2003 and 2010, more than 30% were classified as self-inflicted wounds.  Of late the NRA has been patting itself on the back because the number of firearm deaths that are ruled as accidents is quite low, so low that accidental gun deaths don’t even make it to the list of major accident deaths published by the CDC.  But gun injuries are very serious, the report gives convincing evidence that the costs of gun injury hospitalizations averages $75,000, which means that we are spending an awful lot of money, nearly one billion dollars every year, on taking care of people who didn’t even know how to handle a gun.

The other significant finding from a public health point of view is that more than one-third of gun injury patients had no medical insurance. But this should not surprise, given the fact that 40% of the hospitalizations involved males between the ages of 18-30, which is exactly the age bracket occupied by people who usually make the conscious decision not to carry medical insurance at all. So not only do we face a serious use of medical resources for gun injuries, a third of which could be prevented by simply locking up, locking away or unloading the guns, but we also face a significant impact on public health budgets, since so many of these patients are uninsured.

It seems to me that enough data has now been produced to move the discussion beyond the debate over whether gun violence represents a health issue at all.  And if anyone reading this blog truly believes that physicians and other health professionals should refrain from talking about guns in terms of health, then they’re reading the wrong blog.  Over the next several weeks I’m going to be making some suggestions about how the medical community might try to deal with gun violence at the level where it really counts – the contact with patients before they become a statistic in the next report.

 

 

Related articles

How Savage Were Those Savages? Part 2 of 2.

October 29, 2013

mikethegunguy Blogs, Wilderness , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Native Americans flee from the allegorical rep...

Native Americans flee from the allegorical representation of Manifest Destiny, Columbia, painted in 1872 by John Gast (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the last post I tried to explain that the two civilizations that confronted each other when the United States cleared its wilderness had very different social and political structures because of the difference in how they viewed and used land.  For the Indians, land was something held in common by everyone but owned by no one.  For Whites, land was property with its value set by the market.  We used the Common Law and the political system based on Common Law to secure and protect property; Indians had no law to protect property, hence, no political system based on anything like our conception of laws.

Added to this different view of land was how it was used.  Indigenous populations used land for subsistence; they took what they needed from the land but what they took was the amount required for survival of the tribe.  For white Americans, what was produced from the land very quickly passed from subsistence of people living on the land to commercial enterprise in faraway markets.  Within one generation after the frontier was opened to settlement, even the settlers were deriving their primary goods from faraway markets, delivered to them by wagons, canals and trains.

This difference in how we used land only intensified the degree to which white settlers and the promoters of settlement (commercial interests, government) viewed the Indians as a less-civilized species whose removal from the frontier was a “natural” consequence of the change from wilderness to settled lands.  And the “proof” that the Indians weren’t civilized was the extent to which all our efforts to provide them with the advantages of our civilization through the development of the reservation system ultimately failed.

What’s so interesting about the Indian-White confrontation in North America is that at the beginning, when fur trappers and traders first went West over the Great Plains and through the Rockies, they had a much different view of the Indian civilization than what later emerged when we later pushed the Indians out of the way.  Not only did the early Western explorers need the Indians to show them the trails, the watering-holes and the game, they also reflected again and again on the civilized manner in which the Indians behaved.  Here’s the description of a Snake chief recorded by a member of the Wyeth expedition that crossed the Rockies in 1834: “The chief is a man about fifty years of age, tall and dignified looking with large, strong aquiline features. His manners were cordial and agreeable.”  And here’s a description of Indians met by another traveler in 1810: “Their manner of speaking is extremely dignified and energetic. They gesticulate with great force, freedom and animation.”

These early descriptions of the ‘uncivilized’ inhabitants of our ‘wilderness’ can be found in many of the journals and letters of Western explorers collected on a remarkable website devoted to the history of the Western fur trade.  Reading these documents, and comparing their contents to the “Manifest Destiny” exhortations of Polk or John Quincy Adams makes clear just how different were the views of Whites and Indians about the land in which both were now having to live.  Did the inability of indigenous peoples to cut canals, railroad tracks and highways through this landscape mark them as savages? You decide.

Based on my book, Hunters in the Wilderness.  Volume II in the series, Guns in America, to be published in December.

Related articles

How Savage Were Those Savages? Part 1 of 2.

October 28, 2013

mikethegunguy Wilderness , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Hunkpapa Sioux Chief Sitting Bull in 1885

Hunkpapa Sioux Chief Sitting Bull in 1885 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It took the United States only a quarter-century to populate and settle the vast wilderness that we acquired with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.  Over the period from the opening of the Oregon Trail in 1840 until the joining of the intercontinental railroad in 1869, more than 500,000 people who had previously lived east of the Missouri River either settled between the Missouri and the Rockies or journeyed on to the West Coast. Twenty years after the railroad stretches from coast to coast, the US Census in 1890 declared that the frontier was “closed.”

One of the basic themes of this westward migration and settlement was the idea that as white Americans moved west, they turned the wilderness into civilization and, in the process, civilized all those ‘savages’ who otherwise would have continued living in an uncivilized state.  Much of the notion that we were civilized, they were not, grew out of the fact that the Indians weren’t Christians and hence, by definition, couldn’t be considered as equals to whites in any respect.  But the notion of Indians as savages wasn’t so much an extension of the racism that colored (pardon the pun) the white view of all non-white folks.  Rather, it reflected an absence among Indians of the basic societal relations on which our civilization, both then and now still rests.

What I am referring to is the whole notion of property.  It’s not clear exactly when Western civilization “invented” private property.  We see bits and pieces of private ownership in the earliest Western law codes, but when the Romans marched through Gaul, for example, they encountered many indigenous populations for whom all land was held in common and the notions of private ownership didn’t yet exist.  And even when early monarchs began giving out land grants to reward vassals for fighting on their behalf, the ownership of these properties were tied more to family lineage and occupancy than to any modern notion that allowed the land to be bought and sold.

It was only after the Norman conquest of England that a legal system began to emerge which, at its core, was based on defining and protecting property as something whose value was determined when it was bought and sold.  And it was this legal system, known as the common law, that was brought to the New World and established here by the colonists at Plymouth Bay.  And it was this same legal system that underlay the political system adopted first by the colonies, then by the states, and then by the territories that were formed as we moved west.

There was only one problem.  The Indians had no system of private property.  And because they didn’t have private property, they couldn’t develop a political system that in any way, shape or form, was similar to what existed in what was then called the united States.  In 1868 more than 30 Sioux chiefs, including Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, signed a treaty at Fort Laramie which gave the Indians control in perpetuity for an immense territory which today would have covered most of the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming and a piece of Nebraska.  But what we didn’t understand was that the 30-odd chiefs who put their marks on the document were signing only for themselves.  There wasn’t a single brave in the camps of any of those chiefs who were bound to follow what the treaty said.  And many wouldn’t follow it.  And the treaty was a dead letter within 6 months.

We fought and won the Plains Indian Wars after 1868 because we believed the Indians were ‘savages’ and needed to be taught the white man’s ways.  What else could we do when faced with a population that wasn’t ready to behave?

Based on my book, Hunters in the Wilderness.  Volume II in the series, Guns in America, to be published in December.

Here He Comes Again: Tim Wheeler Continues His Crackpot Attacks On Physicians

October 22, 2013

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , , , , , 3 Comments

NRA Headquarters, Fairfax Virginia USA

NRA Headquarters, Fairfax Virginia USA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Just when I thought we heard the last of him, Tim Wheeler’s back in town with his patented combination of half-truths, distortions and outright lies about physicians and guns.  In case you haven’t heard of him, Wheeler is the head of something called Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership which he founded back in the 90’s to help the NRA convince Congress to cut gun research funding for the CDC.  Wheeler, who claims to be a physician, has never published a scholarly article of any kind, nor for that matter has he ever engaged in any medical or scientific research about guns or anything else. But because he can put the initials MD after his name, the NRA trots him out every time gun research appears in a medical journal.

Wheeler’s loony version of reality was in full evidence this week following the publication of an article in the journal Pediatrics, which is a favorite target for the ravings of delusionals like Wheeler who pander for the NRA.  The article, co-authored by a dozen medical specialists who work in emergency and trauma departments in the Far West, compared treatment outcomes and costs for children at emergency facilities based on the type of injury suffered that led to admission.

In addition to gunshots, the study covered cuts, blunt object injuries, falls and vehicle accidents. Not surprisingly, gun shots comprised the smallest number of all injury categories.  But gunshot injuries also resulted in the highest cost per admission, more than $28,000 per patient (the next highest, vehicle accidents, was $15,000,) and the highest incidence of in-hospital mortality.  In other words, when a kid gets hit with a bullet, he or she will require a degree of medical care that is unlike any level of care required for any other type of serious injury.

In brief, that’s what the article says.  That’s all it says. Oops, there are some recommendations which I’ll quote: “Public health, injury prevention and health policy solutions are needed to reduce gunshot in juries in children.”  I’m quoting the recommendations so that you’ll understand the irresponsibility of Wheeler who reacted to this study in an appearance on NRA’s Cam Edward’s talk show by condemning the “anti-gun hype” of this and other medical research on guns.  And just to make sure that his argument remained at the absolutely lowest intellectual level, he didn’t miss the opportunity to remind everyone that since the majority of the gunshot patients were minority males ages 15 to 19, there’s no doubt that they were gang members whose criminal behavior brought the injury on themselves.

The truth is, that with the exception of quacks like Wheeler, the NRA is afraid of physicians. They fear physicians because they know that most Americans probably trust their physician more than they trust anyone else.  They rely on their doctors, they confess their deepest fears and secrets to their doctors, and when a parent wakes up in the middle of the night and hears that child in the next room having difficulty breathing, he’s not going to grab the phone and call the NRA.  He’s going to call the doctor.

The NRA has spent the last twenty years trying to convince us that we will all be safer if we all have a gun.  Most physicians disagree.  I’m not sure that the research has yet been conducted or published that definitively proves one or the other point of view.  But I do know that the shrill and stupid comments by people like Timothy Wheeler only serve to debase the efforts of honest people to search for a reasonable point of view.

 

Related articles

Want To Own A Gun? Move To New York City.

October 20, 2013

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , , , , , 1 Comment

English: New York Mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg.

English: New York Mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you follow the gun debate at all, you’re aware of the fact that Mike Bloomberg, the soon-to-be ex-Mayor of New York City, takes credit for a steep decline in the city’s crime rate due to his strict enforcement of the city’s tough gun laws.  But while this may mean that very few city residents own legal guns, research published by Gary Kleck (UCLA Law Review, #56, 2009) indicates that within another few years, the number of illegal guns may exceed the number of adults living within the city.  Imagine that!  The city with the toughest gun laws will also be home to the largest number of guns.  How is that possible?

According to Kleck, roughly 60,000 people move into New York City every year.  He doesn’t know how many people move out of the city each year, he’s just interested in how many move in.  Why?  Because he assumes that they bring guns with them when they show up. In 2000, just under 800,000 NYC residents had been born in another state:

These migrants presumably moved their possessions with them.  If handgun ownership among these migrants was equal to the U.S. average, migrants born in other states would have moved about 260,000 handguns from other states into NYC.

Kleck bases his calculations on the idea that per capita American handgun ownership is .0325 (one-third of a gun for every person.)  But those numbers have changed.  In fact, since the 1980s, handguns have entered the market over long guns by a ratio of two to one.  So the per capita ownership of handguns is probably now close to 0.50.  This being the case, if we follow Kleck’s logic to its ultimate conclusion, the continued migration of people into New York City from 2000 until 2013 means that at least 400,000 new handguns have come into town during the same period. Add this to the 2 million guns that NYPD believe were in the city in 1980, then tack on another 30,000 each year between 1981 and 2000, and we are up to 3 million guns.
If the demographic breakdown of New York City is anything like the national average, there are approximately 2,700,000 males between the ages of 18 and 65 living in the five boroughs right now.  Since very few women own guns, let’s add in the men over the age of 65 and the total is still below the total number of guns floating around the Big Apple.
You don’t have to take my word for it.  Just read Kleck’s article and do the math. New York City is the handgun haven of the United States.  There’s no doubt about it.

How Do We Know That Crime Is Going Up or Down?

October 18, 2013

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Violent crime rates 1973-2005

Violent crime rates 1973-2005 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Every time the gun control crowd makes a peep, the NRA and its juggernaut PR operation swings into high gear to remind  us that Americans are safer because we can own guns.  And they point to the fact that over the last twenty years, while the number of guns in private hands has doubled, the rate of violent crime has dropped by half.  Now let’s forget the fact that 95% of the decline in violent crime took place fifteen years ago and that over the last few years the violent crime rate has been slowly inching up.  If for nothing other than coincidence, you still can’t argue with the notion that more guns does seem to equal less crime.

But a funny thing happened the last time this debate broke out, namely, that despite the evidence of a decrease in violent crime, a majority of Americans feel that they are living in a more dangerous place.  This was the finding of public opinion polls published both by Gallop and Pew, the former finding that more than two-thirds of their respondents felt crime was worse, the latter pegging the number at 55 percent.  Given these findings, should it surprise that so many Americans are heeding the NRA’s call and rushing down to their local ;police stations to apply for permits to carry a gun?  Every day we read another story about how police agencies are unable to keep up with the flood of applicants for concealed-carry permits while most gun manufacturers report that they are at least six months behind in  catching up with the demand for small, concealable guns.

But if you want to blame the NRA for ginning up public concern about crime and therefore the necessity to go out and buy a gun, you may be barking up the wrong tree.  Because it turns out the percentage of Americans who believe that crime has increased and are in favor of stricter gun laws outweighs the percentage who agree that crime has increased but are against stricter laws by a factor of two to one! And even though this is a Rasmussen poll, and everyone knows that Rasmussen screwed up 2012, a difference of 64% to 28% simply can’t be ascribed to the bias or agenda of the polling organization.

So where does this disconnect between perception and reality about crime come from on the part of people who don’t like guns?  You might find the following story interesting, if not instructive.  Last week a community discussion about gun violence took place in Jamaica Plain, MA, which is a middle-class, racially and ethnically mixed community bordering the Roxbury ghetto on one side and the very affluent community of Brookline on the other. The meeting was called by the area’s State Representative, Jeff Sanchez, who supports a new gun law proposed by Gov. Patrick.

Reading the report of this meeting, it’s clear that the tone and the content of the meeting was decidedly anti-gun.  But what caught my eye was the comment by County Sheriff, Steve Tompkins, who noted that Massachusetts already had some of the toughest gun laws in the country but gun crimes were “spiraling” upwards.  Not moving slightly upwards, not increasing substantially, spiraling upwards. His word, not mine.

There’s only one problem with this ‘spiral.’  It doesn’t exist.  In 2011 Massachusetts recorded 28, 232 violent crimes, including 184 murders, 19,626 assaults and 6,768 robberies.  For 2012, violent crime totalled 26.953, murders were 121,  assaults were 18,638 and robberies were 6,552.  In fact the data clearly shows that there has been a crime spiral in Massachusetts – downward; more than a 5% decline in the overall numbers in one year.  The drop in murders (roughly 30%) is particularly significant because murders are mostly committed with guns.

I don’t blame the folks who attended this meeting for thinking that crime is increasing when their own law enforcement officials tell them that this is the case, even when the same officials send data to the FBI that shows the opposite to be true.  But I have to wonder about the motivation of law enforcement officials who talk about the ‘spiraling’ of crime to the people whose taxes pay their salaries.  I hav to wonder…

 

 

Related articles

It’s Official! When It Comes To Murders, The Second City Is Now The First City

October 9, 2013

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , , , , , 2 Comments

fbi

 

 

Chicago has always been known as the ‘Second City’ because it can’t seem to compete with New York.  But that’s changed.  The latest report on American crime released annually by the FBI, shows that when it comes to murder, Chicago now leads the list.

Since my diaries on crime seem to generate lots of bickering over the data, I want to make one thing very clear: the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports are estimates because: 1) they are based on partial data; 2) they assume that every reporting department collects and analyzes its crime data in the same way. Nevertheless, the gap between murders in Chicago and everywhere else are so great that we can say with some degree of certainty that the Windy City has really stepped it up in 2012.

According to the FBI, Chicago had 500 murders in 2012, while New York dropped to a paltry 419. Note, incidentally, that New York’s population is three times  higher than Chicago’s (8.7 million to 2.7 million, respectively) which makes Chicago’s murder rate (per 100,000) about four times higher than New York’s rate, 18 to 4.8.

Think Chicago’s an unsafe city? Think again. The 2012  murder rate in Flint, MI was 63! Down the road a bit in Detroit the rate was only 55. Philadelphia’s a veritable garden of tranquility with a homicide rate just slightly over 21.

Altogether there were 15 cities that counted at least 100 murders in 2012: The Big 4 above, plus Los Angeles (299), Baltimore (219), Houston (217), New Orleans (193), Dallas (154), Memphis (133), Oakland (126), Phoenix (124), St. Louis (113), Kansas City (105) and Indianapolis (101).

The total population for these cities is somewhere between 25 and 30 million. Their police departments reported 3,420 homicides in 2012, out of a national reported total of 14,827. Which means that cities that held less than 10% of the US population accounted for almost one-quarter of all murders. Way to go you big cities!

What I find most significant about the FBI data on the geography of homicide is not the cities that made the murder list, but the cities that didn’t. Jacksonville, for example, didn’t make the list. Think there’s no inner-city neighborhoods in Jacksonville? Next time you drive down I-95 on your way to Daytona or Palm Beach, get off at Lem Turner Road and cruise around.

There are lots of cities like Jacksonville filled with crummy neighborhoods whose existence we lament but really don’t do anything to help things change. And many of these cities don’t have double-digit murder rates and yet we don’t know why. Twenty years ago, for example, New York City initiated a community-based policing  system that was credited with steep declines in crime. It was copied by virtually every other metropolitan police department and in some places it worked and in others made no difference at all.

One last point about the 2012 FBI Report: It shows that the average value of the property that was reported stolen in larceny and burglary increased from $1,721 in 2011 to $1,726 in 2012. Maybe the economy is finally recovering.

Related articles

Wilderness Versus Progress: Is There Really A Conflict?

October 7, 2013

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , , , , , Leave a comment

U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (left) and n...

U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (left) and nature preservationist John Muir, founder of the , on Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park. In the background: Upper and lower Yosemite Falls. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The first argument about preserving versus developing wilderness was the fight over the Hetchy-Hetchy Reservoir in California’s Yosemite Park which erupted in 1908. Opposition to the development of a new water system for San Francisco was led by the Sierra Club, which had been founded by John Muir in 1892.

Muir was originally an easterner who was closely associated with Roosevelt and other early conservationists, but he was not a hunter and his motivation to preserve natural spaces did not grow out of a desire to conserve animal habitat so much as to preserve wilderness areas. But as the country continued to grow and the space between the Missouri River and the West Coast was filled in, the issue of wilderness versus development could not remain a back-room debate for the simple reason that there was too much at stake.  Once railroad lines stretched not only from coast to coast but throughout the interior itself, the resources of the frontier zones – crops, animals, timber – were simply too abundant and could be moved to market too cheaply to resist exploitation by commercial interests on both coasts.

The early conservationists, including Roosevelt, acknowledged the inherent conflict between maintaining natural space on the one hand and retarding economic growth on the other.  But as the conservation movement morphed into environmentalism, a wedge was driven between the two movements that claimed management responsibility for as-yet undeveloped space, a wedge based on one question: what should be the role of government in managing the natural patrimony?

For hunters/conservationists, government’s role was to be limited to enforcing rules that regulated the relationship of hunters to wild game: giving hunters access to hunting areas, restricting the hunt to periods that would allow the natural migration and reproduction of species.  Environmentalists, on the other hand, wanted government regulation to cover the entire natural patrimony; not to control the behavior of hunters who otherwise might threaten wildlife, but to control the behavior of developers who otherwise might threaten the entire environment.

What we have ended up with is the notion that wilderness preservation versus economic development are inextricably opposed; that you either wind up with one or the other.  Every development initiative is a threat to nature, every preservation plan is an effort to derail economic development.  The fight over the Keystone pipeline is the argument in its current form.

The origins of the fight go back to 1890 when the Census declared the wilderness to be closed.  But the United States was the only country in the entire world that industrialized and closed its frontier at the same time.  In Europe, the wilderness disappeared a thousand years before the Industrial Revolution began.  In America we were laying railroad track and slaughtering buffalo at the same time.

The truth is that our extraordinary economic development took place not as a conflict with nature, but because we were able to tap the abundant resources of nature for the first time.  Urban centers that appeared in Europe during the 19th century competed for building materials that had to be expensively extracted and shipped from distances far and wide; Chicago was built from wood that floated down from Wisconsin.

Ten years after we closed our frontier the output of our national economy surpassed the combined production of all the other industrialized economies combined.  The resources that fueled American economic development were so cheap that re-investment and further growth could occur at three or four times the rate experienced in other industrializing zones.  The greatest irony is that the self-same conservationists, like Roosevelt and Grinnell, who mourned the disappearance of wilderness came from the elite class whose economic fortunes derived from the resources extracted from the wilderness itself.

This is the 3rd and final summary of our fourthcoming book on hunting and conservation to be published by the end of the year.

American conservationist John Muir (1838-1914)

American conservationist John Muir (1838-1914) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What Do We Do About Gun Violence?

October 6, 2013

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , , , , , 6 Comments

At least two-thirds of the perpetrators who commit gun homicides are males under the age of 30.  What else do these shooters have in common?  They live in neighborhoods with overall high crime rates and low family income, they had previous contact with their victim, all facts that are well known. But there’s another commonality these shooters share which, as far as I can tell, isn’t mentioned in the discussions about gun violence and crime.

The commonality has to do with certain neurological and developmental factors shared by males under the age of 30.  It turns out that the part of the brain that controls processing of information about impulse, desire, goals, self-interest, rules and risk develops latest and probably isn’t fully formed until the mid-20’s or later.  And while adolescents and young adults both perceive and balance ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ as well as older adults, they tend to let peer pressures rather than expected outcomes guide their behavior when they have to choose between risks and rewards.

Now take this neurological-behavioral profile of males between ages 15 to 30 and stick a gun in their hands. The brain research clearly demonstrates that kids and young adults walking around with guns understand the risks involved. Whether it’s the NSSF’s new Project ChildSafe, the NRA’s Eddie Eagle or the community-specific gun safety programs that have expanded since Sandy Hook, nobody’s telling the kids something they don’t already know.

So what can we do to mitigate what President Obama calls this ‘epidemic’ of gun violence when the population most at risk consciously chooses to ignore the risk?  I think the simplest answer would be to look at what communities have done to protect themselves from other kinds of epidemics that threatened public health in the past.  And the most effective method has been to quarantine, or isolate the area or population where the threat is most extreme.  It worked in 14th-century Italy, according to Boccaccio in The Decameron.  Why wouldn’t it work now?

Last month the city of Springfield, Mass., recorded its 12th gun homicide.  If the killing rate continues, the city might hit 15 shooting fatalities this year, a number it actually surpassed  in 2010.  This gives the city a homicide rate of 10.2 per 100,000 residents, nearly three times the national rate.  But the city’s overall rate hides the fact that virtually all the violence takes place in two specific neighborhoods bounded on the north by Interstate 291 and on the south by State Route 83.  There two neighborhoods contain less than 40,000 residents which means that the homicide rates here are 40 per 100,000, more than 10 times the national rate.  This isn’t an epidemic?

2010 springfield homicide

                                                                                             2013 springfield homicides

Springfield Homicides 2010                                                                                                                                                    Springfield Homicides 2013

In 2010, not a single victim was older than 35 and 5 were not yet 20, the average age of all victims was 22.  This year there have been three older victims (+35 y/o) but otherwise the 2010 average age remains about the same in 2013.  If I had room to show the data for 2011 and 2012, the map would be the same.  Why can’t this area be designated a quarantine zone?  Following the designation, the police would behave like public health workers and conduct a residence-by-residence contact with everyone in the quarantine zone.  Ask every resident if they have seen any guns, ask permission to conduct a premise search, create a “watch list” of persons or residences that appear to be particularly high risk.  There’s no Constitutional issues here, you’re not kicking down any doors.  But you are telling people that there is one thing that must be done to curb the epidemic: the epidemic known as violence is carried by a virus known as guns and they must be eliminated in order to reduce the risk.

Related articles

Emily Got Her Gun And Lost Her Mind

October 2, 2013

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , , , , , 1 Comment

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.

 

 

Related articles

Older Entries Newer Entries