It’s Not For Or Against The 2nd Amendment - It’s About Fear Versus Hope

May 12, 2024

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The debate over gun control has never been as polarized as right now. The NRA refers to itself as being “under attack like never before.” In 1968 the NRA supported the background check provisions of the Gun Control Act. Now they refuse to discuss any changes at all. Why the change?

It has to do with the message the NRA has been sending out to its membership; a message that is similar to the message that most conservative pundits, bloggers and advocacy organizations have been promoting since at least the WTC attack in 2001. And the message boils down to the idea that not only is the NRA under attack, but we are all under attack both by terrorists from abroad and liberal ‘values’ at home. The fact that two dopey kids who may or may not have had some vague connections to a Russian terrorist group blew up scores of pedestrians and runners in Boston last month only reinforces the idea that danger is imminent and we must stand up and defend, with force if necessary, ourselves, our families, our country and our values.

Combine the ‘dangerous times’ theme with a liberal, activist President who wants more gun control and - voila! - you’ve got a marketing and sales bonanza. Here’s a little excerpt from the NRA Guide to Personal Protection Outside the Home: “As a general rule, any strangers who approach you may constitute a potential threat, no matter who they seem or claim to be.” Yesterday we went for a walk in Manhattan on the high-line elevated park along the West Side. Do you know how many strangers approached me as we walked along? Probably several thousand.

So I have a choice. I can live in a state of perpetual fear, arm myself to the teeth and try to figure out how to protect myself from every possible threat. Or I can hope that a way will be found to put aside the incendiary rhetoric, define the problems we face in realistic terms, and come up with some reasonable and workable solutions. Want to help? Please sign on.

A Mother’s Day Message from Evolve’s Rebecca Bond

May 11, 2024

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A Mother’s (Day) View of the Gun Debate.

As Mother’s Day approaches and I think of all the moms missing their children due to gun violence, I wonder what it is going to take for people in this country to rise up with their voices and protect like a mom.

That’s what moms do. They protect. From the moment the first extraordinary heartbeat appears on the screen in the doctor’s office and mom says a first ‘hello baby’ to the beating speck, a protective instinct kicks in. It’s not hard, it’s what is innate to moms. We go to our monthly check-ups, we eat better, we sleep more, we talk to the growing speck, that turns into a bit of an alien on-screen by nine months. We cry from hormones and wonder why everything makes us cry. We spend extraordinary amounts of time researching the right car seat, crib, mobile to hang over the crib, baby proofing the house.

While all of this is going on, we endure swollen feet, swollen belly, pants that don’t fit, swollen faces we don’t recognize, backaches and learning to sleep in strangely contorted positions from the ever-expanding (sometimes at a quick shocking pace) belly. While we are ‘enduring’ some of these shocking truths required for producing this future Einstein, Picasso, teacher, president, daughter or son, we know that what we are doing is creating a miracle that cannot be replicated.

When that baby is handed to us in the delivery room, it is one of the most – if not the most — extraordinary moments in our lives. The power and the privilege that we have to create life is extraordinary.

As a mother goes through the moments when her child first recognizes her voice, her laugh, her touch, there is a bond created that is like no other. One that allows her to hear the cry in the night that no one else can hear. One that makes her think to herself: if something were to happen to this miracle, I could never go on. I would never stop crying.

When I started Evolve, after the horrific tragedy of Sandy Hook, it was because I could not contemplate anything more unimaginable than taking away the life of a child. My child or another mother’s child. One of our human miracles. It wasn’t about guns to me. It was about a mother’s conscience and the unfathomable idea that 20 children could be massacred and what if? What if nothing happened and we continue to look away from the truth about gun violence and gun behaviors in this country? As a mother, it was too unimaginable to consider.

What drove me to start Evolve is knowing that we have to do better. That as mothers we must do better to make saving a life our priority. We know that human life is fragile because we know first-hand the miracle of creating one. We also know once that life is created, we must do everything within our power – within our society’s power – to ensure that life does not go to waste.

Guns are powerful, but human choice is more powerful. More powerful than a gun, more powerful than legislation, more powerful than the Second Amendment.

I read news report after news report every day about incidents that could have been prevented. Loaded and unlocked guns left in cars, stashed in closets, under beds, propped up against the wall like a kitchen broom, guns given to children that are emotionally unstable and just shouldn’t be exposed to them. These are just poor choices that cheapen the value of human life. What is the debate? Stupid and casual behavior has nothing to do with the Second Amendment or laws. This has to do with how much we value human life. If we value human life, we make make choices that protect it. We don’t wait for someone to make it a law or legislate. We use our heads, our common sense, our motherly instinct.

We all give ourselves labels: liberal, conservative, gun owner, gun reformer, but none of those are instinctive. They are not in our DNA. I’ll never forget the moment a family member – a mom — transformed before my very eyes from an adversary arguing the cause of gun rights and into a mom who cares about protecting children. Perhaps maternal instincts are the key to solving this horrific problem.

What is it about this conversation that is so hard for people to have? Children and people across this country are killed or injured every day because of a bullet. 100,000-plus. We don’t need special reports to wrap our heads around that number. It’s everywhere. It’s a suicide problem, it’s an urban problem, it’s a gun loophole problem, it is a parenting problem and, most of all, it is this country’s problem.

Give all those mother’s of gun violence victims a break this Mother’s Day. Don’t make them have to explain to you why this important, don’t make them have to sadly walk the halls of our government offices explaining why they don’t want another mother to suffer their fate. Give them the day off. Take a moment to consider how you could help them honor their child’s memory by doing something that is just plain reasonable. Common sense. Guns are in your home, in your community, they’re unlocked, they’re in glove boxes, they are in the hands of someone who shouldn’t have them. Say something or do something because it is the right thing to do for our country and this society. Something that might preserve our future miracles.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers of miracles.

 

Rebecca Bond

Founder of Evolve

Committed to saving a life

5/11/13

 

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2013/03/06/exp-pmt-evolve-rebecca-and-john-bond-guns.cnn

http://evolvetogether.us/

http://www.sandyhookpromise.org/

Glenn Beck’s Book: CONTROL

May 10, 2024

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Glenn Beck just published a book about Guns called Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns. Beck has built an audience for two reasons. First, he pretends to be loony. The Bloomberg-Hitler stunt during his NRA speech was right in character. It’s like going to a NASCAR race and waiting for the crash. Sooner or later if you can sit there long enough, Beck will say something that’s really nuts. Second, he always makes you think that you’re going to get the “inside” scoop. He has this rather charming way of making you believe that he’s discovered something that no one else knows and he wants to share it just with you.

Which is what made me buy this book. After all, there’s precious little I don’t know about guns. So if he’s going to expose the truth about guns, maybe there’s something out there that I still need to know. I should have known better. The book doesn’t ‘expose’ anything at all. Beck grabs information from the usual conservative-leaning gun researchers like John Lott and Dave Grossman and he has no trouble shooting down various straw horses like Alan Dershowitz, Chuck Schumer and Stephen King. Actually, the book is pretty boring; nothing sensational, nothing new.

But there is one recurrent theme that flits in and out of virtually every chapter. And it’s a rather remarkable stance for someone like Beck to take. One of the issues that comes up again and again in the gun debate is whether the United States has more crime and violence than other countries that have more restrictive gun laws. Some say yes, some say no. Liberals in favor of gun control point to data that shows that we have many more guns than other countries and much higher homicide levels; conservatives who are against gun control produce evidence that shows our crime rate to be much lower than other countries because we have so many guns.

Beck spends a lot of time comparing criminal data in the US to data from other countries and of course as a conservative he’s at pains to show that, if there’s any correlation between guns and crime, it’s that guns keep us safer and result in less crime. He’s so committed to this comparative approach that I counted at least 14 times in the first 35 pages where he produced evidence that compared something about guns and crime in the US to something about guns and crime somewhere else.

I’m not really sure if his evidence stacks up. But what I find interesting is that he would attempt to make any comparisons at all. I find it interesting because it contradicts a fundamental axiom of current conservative orthodoxy, namely, the notion of American exceptionalism. Conservatives trot out American exceptionalism at every opportunity, particularly when they can link it to the un-Americanism of liberals starting with Obama and going right down the line. According to Beck and his cohorts, America is the only country that has ever been endowed by The Creator, Americans (i.e., real Americans) are the only people who enjoy liberty because it was given to them by God, and so on and so forth.

Given this belief in American exceptionalism, why would conservatives like Glenn Beck even care about whether we have more crime or less crime than England, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Sarawak or anyplace else? And since America is so exceptional, which means it’s really so different, how could any comparison between America and anywhere else tell us anything of value anyway? Not only are we different from everywhere else, we also can’t learn anything from studying anyone else. After all, the US is the cradle of liberty and free enterprise. The rest of the world suffers from various forms of Socialism, Communism, Fascism, Tribalism, Islamicism, God knows what else.

If I were a conservative, to be consistent I wouldn’t care whether we had more or less crime than other countries. I wouldn’t link any of my thoughts on gun control to experiences around the globe. I wouldn’t care whether Hitler, Stalin or Mao enslaved the masses, and I certainly wouldn’t assume that just because dictators disarmed their populations in other countries that something like that could happen here. But if Beck and other conservatives really believe that the American government might take away our guns, the only real example he should point to are the post-Reconstruction laws that were passed in Southern states to take guns away from freed Blacks.

Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns is boring and dull. And the only reason that Beck’s NRA audience didn’t fall asleep was they hoped and prayed that at some point he’d pull a real Beck. They weren’t disappointed.

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Here They Go Again

May 10, 2024

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NRA Headquarters, Fairfax Virginia USA

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

One of the main objectives of this blog is to be something of a one-man “truth squad” for the gun world. There is probably no other subject in which the ability to throw around opinions that have absolutely no relationship to the facts is so widespread. And this is primarily because of the division in the gun world between the haves and the have-nots; i.e., people who have guns and people who don’t. And not only don’t these two groups know what the other is talking about, but while the haves are extremely passionate about their guns, the have-nots really couldn’t care less. So the passion of the haves often drive them to say things that, shall we say, aren’t completely true (I’m being polite) and the unconcern on the part of the have-nots often results in a lack of interest about the facts as well. I’m going to expand on this issue - the cultural gap between the haves and the have-nots in a lengthy and detailed blog, but for the moment, here’s a brief example.

Last week the Department of Justice released its annual report on gun crime and noted that gun homicides had dropped from 18,000+ in 1993 to 11,000+ in 2011 - a decline of nearly 40%. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2013/05/07/doj-gun-violence-down-semi-automatics-a-minor-issue/.) The report was immediately seized on by the NRA and its right-wing minions (for example, Breitbart:http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/05/07/Justice-Dept-Report-Destroys-Medias-Gun-Control-Narrative) to show that the liberal “assault” on the 2nd Amendment was misplaced because gun violence was steadily decreasing without additional gun control measures. Even the AP repeated the “gun violence is down” mantra and let one of the NRA’s staunchest supporters, Senator John Thune (R-SD) use the report to take a shot at gun control advocates: “That’s what many of us have argued all along, is that focusing just exclusively on the guns is not the correct approach to this,” he said. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_GUN_VIOLENCE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT.

One little problem. What the report actually shows is that gun homicides dropped from 18,000+ in 1993 to 10,500+ in 200 and have since then been steady and actually come back up slightly. So there hasn’t been a steady, two-decade drop in gun homicides, which is how the NRA trumpeted the report on their website; there was a seven-year decline which, by the way, paralleled the first six years of the ban on hi-cap magazines that was part of the 1994 Clinton crime bill. I should add, by the way, that we have never been able to figure out whether there was any connection between homicide rates and gun controls since the NRA was able to get all gun research conducted by the CDC ended in 1996. I’m not saying there is a connection, I’m just saying we can’t find out.

My point is simply this: It’s a real misuse of data to say that there has been a 20-year trend if, in fact, the actual trend stopped thirteen years ago but numbers have not significantly reversed since that time. But it doesn’t matter whether it’s the NRA or one of their friendly bloggers or even the “reliable” Associated Press. When it comes to guns, everyone gets it wrong most of the time.

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Background Checks: Do They Make a Difference?

May 9, 2024

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Until 1968, the Federal Government only regulated the sale of automatic weapons. This changed after the assassinations of Kennedy and King, at which point the Feds got into the gun regulation business big time. The Gun Control Act of 1968 prohibited mail-order gun purchases but more importantly, defined for the first time certain types of individuals who could not own or purchase a firearm. With a few additions and revisions, the reasons that prohibit individuals from owning firearms anywhere in the United States has not really changed since 1968.

The form used for background checks is known as the 4473. Every gun that is transferred between a dealer and a consumer requires that the purchaser fill out the 4473 which is then used by the dealer to perform a background with the FBI. In addition to personal identifiers (name, address, birth date, etc.,) the buyer must then answer a series of questions that, if answered in the affirmative, would prohibit transfer of the firearm, including such issues as felony indictments or convictions, restraining orders, domestic violence and so forth.

From 1968 until 1998 the background check form was filled out for all dealer transfers, but there was no actual check performed to validate the information. The forms were kept on file by each dealer and the ATF could inspect the forms but had no way of knowing whether, in fact, the information on each form was true or false.

In 1998, as part of the Brady Act, the FBI created the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, known as NICS, which aggregates state and federal criminal databases. The law requires that every time a firearm is transferred between a federally-licensed dealer and a customer, the customer fills out the form and the dealer then calls the NICS phone center and gets approval for the transaction. If the transaction is denied, the customer can appeal the decision, but of the 12,000 or so background checks that I have performed, I can count total denials on the fingers of two hands.

Most people who purchase guns from a dealer pass the background check which is why people who would fail the check tend to acquire their guns through private transactions which aren’t covered by the Brady Law. But if the Senate and then the House had actually passed a bill that extended background checks to all gun transactions, would it make us any safer, as the proponents of universal background checks insist?

According to the NRA, background checks and gun violence have nothing to do with each other. They point to the fact that Adam Lanza’s mother passed the background check when she purchased the rifle and the pistols that her son subsequently used to massacre 20 children and 6 adults in Sandy Hook. The Aurora theater shooter, had he been a better shot, would have killed more people than died during Lanza’s rampage, and he purchased all his guns after passing background checks.

The problem with the NRA position, of course, is that it sidesteps the issue of guns as a contributor to violence, regardless of whose hands, background-checked or not, are holding the gun. “Guns don’t kill people,” says the NRA, “people kill people.” But the truth is that in other countries where gun ownership is strictly controlled, there’s still plenty of serious crime, but many fewer homicides take place. In fact, our serious crime rate is about even with countries like Germany and Denmark, but our homicide rate is three times higher than either country, largely the result of guns being used in criminal attacks.

The proponents of expanded background checks, on the other hand, point to data from the FBI, which shows that each year more than 70,000 potential gun owners fail background checks, which represents a significant number of guns that do not fall into the wrong hands. Except we don’t really know whether they fall into the wrong hands, because we have no idea how or when any guns actually fall into the wrong hands.

In 2010, approximately 3 million handguns (pistols and revolvers) came onto the U.S. market, That same year, there were roughly 31,000 deaths caused by firearms (Yea, yea, I know, guns don’t kill people, people kill people….) There were also somewhere around 80,000 woundings caused by firearms (Yea, yea, I know again….) So there were 110,000 incidents of gun violence. Now let’s subtract the accidents (about 1,000 deaths and 15,000 woundings) and the suicides, both successful and not-so-succesful (20,000.) We end up with 75,000 deaths and injuries where clearly a gun got into the “wrong” hands.

We also know that at least 85% of all killings and woundings from guns involved handguns. So if every single shooting that took place in 2010 was done with a gun that entered the market that same year (which, of course is absurd, but just follow my line of argument a little further) it would mean that less than 3% of all handguns acquired by Americans in 2010 were used in the commission of a crime.

Fact: Every gun that enters the US market goes through at least 3 separate transactions, all of which are both legal and documented as to the identity of seller and buyer. This is true from the moment the gun leaves the factory or the importer until it is placed in the hands of the first consumer. Despite the hue and cry of ‘gun trafficking’ and the existence of rogue dealers, the ATF is particularly diligent when it comes to monitoring Acquisition & Disposition records that track the movement of all guns.

Which brings us to the BIG QUESTION: At which point did the 75,000 guns that were involved in all gun felonies move from the legal to the illegal environment? If we knew the answer to this question we could, at least in theory, begin to develop some mitigating strategies. At this point we cannot. And extending background checks to private transactions probably would have some, but not much impact on understanding this problem because once a gun moves into the prohibited environment, it’s not moving back into legal hands.

Most felony guns end up moving into an environment where they will be used illegally or inappropriately because at some point, a legal owner decides that it just doesn’t matter who ends up owning or using the gun. This decision could be made by the first owner, or the person to whom he sold the gun or the owner after that. But no amount of legal penalties surrounding the transfer of guns from one person to another will stop 3% of gun owners from having no concern about the disposition of their guns unless every gun owner becomes committed to a safe and secure disposition of their firearms

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When Is An Assault Rifle Not An Assault Rifle?

May 9, 2024

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The origins of the term ‘Modern Sporting Rifle’ are somewhat obscure. The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) claims that MSRs were the lever-action rifles developed by Spencer and later by Winchester with a tubular magazine that held 8-10 rounds. The rifles were shorter and lighter than standard infantry guns and were used primarily by cavalry units. The Winchester repeater saw more frequent use during the two decades it took to pacify the various Plains Indian tribes, and from that time until the present continues to be favored by hunters primarily for short-distance deer shoots.

There’s only one problem with this little NSSF history lesson: The term ‘Modern Sporting Rifle” didn’t exist back when Spencer and Winchester made their rifles. The term was coined, in fact, by the NSSF and the gun industry to get such products accepted by chain stores like Cabela’s that were at first reluctant to display military-style weapons in retail venues frequented by families (read: mothers and children.) The gun industry portrays the design of these rifles as nothing more than just another example of consumer goods reflecting changing tastes, as in the following quote by NSSF President Steve Sanetti:

“Nothing looks like it did 50 or 100 years ago.” Today, this is the way a rifle looks. It doesn’t have a wood stock or blued steel. Yet it has become ‘America’s rifle.’”

But hold on a minute, Steve. There are many rifles out there today that look exactly like they looked fifty years ago. The semi-auto Remington 750, still a very popular gun, has been in production (with various name changes) since 1952. The Browning BAR, another semi-auto hunting rifle, hasn’t basically changed since 1967.

What’s changed is the gun industry’s attempt to make high-capacity, military-style rifles palatable with today’s political sensitivities, not today’s marketing tastes. When I bought my first Colt AR-15 forty-five years ago, nobody had any problem referring to it as an assault rifle. The term had been around since the end of World War II, when it first was applied to an automatic rifle, the StG 44, known as the sturmgewehr (which literally means ‘assault’ or ‘storm’) issued to units of the Wehrmacht in 1944.

The landscape began to change in 1994, when the Democrats, led by Dianne Feinstein, pushed through a ten-year ban on “assault” rifles as part of a national anti-crime bill. According to the NSSF and other gun industry mouthpieces, the use of the term ‘assault rifle,’ was an attempt by anti-gun elements to get rid of these weapons by creating the fiction that they were no different from rifles used by the military. In fact, it wasn’t only liberal, anti-gun “elements” that ganged up on the poor, law-abiding assault rifle owners. On the eve of the vote in Congress, the following letter was sent to Republican Congressmen, urging them to vote for the ban:

As a longtime gun owner and supporter of the right to bear arms, I, too, have carefully thought about this issue. I am convinced that the limitations imposed in this bill are absolutely necessary. I know there is heavy pressure on you to go the other way, but I strongly urge you to join me in supporting this bill. It must be passed.

The author of the letter, a really hard-core member of the liberal “element,” was Ronald Reagan.

The NSSF can say whatever it wants about why the Modern Sporting Rifle is different from military weapons, but the difference boils down to one thing, namely, that assault rifles used by the military are designed to shoot multiple rounds with one pull of the trigger (automatic) while the civilian versions require a separate trigger pull (semi-automatic) for every shot. But from a design and function perspective, this is hardly a game-changer, because most assault weapons carried by the military also provide the option of being fired on either automatic or semi-automatic mode. In fact, most assault weapons carried by our guys and gals in combat zones shoot either one or two shots for each trigger pull, because the odds of putting more than two auto-fire shots on target are slim to none.

If anyone out there really believes that the purpose of making a civilian version of the assault rifle is to somehow lull consumers into thinking that they aren’t getting their hands on a military gun, consider the description of the product by Colt Firearms, the company that manufactured both the first military and civilian versions:

Colt’s rifles are the only rifles available to sportsmen, hunters and other shooters that are manufactured in the Colt factory and based on the same military standards and specifications as the United States issue Colt M16 rifle and M4 carbine.

So here we have the company that took Gene Stoner’s brilliant design, then converted it first into the AR-15 for civilian sales and then into the M16 for military use. That’s correct folks, the current Colt M4 rifle carried by our troops (and plenty of other combatants) started out as acommercial design that was adapted to military use - not the other way around. Oh well, what’s a few facts when facts really don’t matter, right?ar

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Latest & Greatest

May 9, 2024

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And here’s the link to the one that confirmed my status as a real gun know-it-all: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-weisser/open-letter-to-wayne-lapi_b_3219807.html

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