“Where Adventure, Style And Culture Collide” - Welcome To The New NRA.

May 13, 2024

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noirNow that the NRA has figured out that the next generation of consumers may not be as interested in buying guns as previous generations, they have started their own television and internet network known as “NRA Freestyle, ” which will be a place where “adventure, style, culture and firearms collide.” It will be interesting to see whether an organization whose rank-and-file membership is overwhelmingly White, male, rural, blue-collar and over 50 can re-orient itself to capture the hearts and minds of a population that is increasingly non-White, college educated, urban-suburban and pro-gay lifestyle. And most of all, it’s a population, according to Pew and other surveys, that has little, if any loyalty or even interest in the ideology of either political party.

So it was with these thoughts in mind that I tuned into the premiere of Noir, the first show to be aired on the Freestyle network. The show stars Colion Noir, an African-American from Texas who has been part of the NRA commentator’s stable for the past year and is considered the “proof” that one can be hip, cool, minority and everything else non-mainstream and still like guns. Actually, the videos he does for the NRA are contrived, aimless and basically do nothing except repeat the usual anti-Obama Administration bromides wrapped in a BET-accented script.

In the new show Colion is joined by a woman commentator, Amy Robbins, the two of them sitting in a bare-bones studio set whose main decoration is a large, white logo for the NRA. The show, running slightly longer than 15 minutes, is a series of dialogues between Noir and Robbins, she both by her presence and her comments reminding everyone of the importance of the female gun market even though, in fact, women continue to have little interest in guns.

But despite the hip and cool verbal pitter-patter between a Black guy and a White girl, let’s not forget what the show’s really all about. It takes Noir and Robbins about 5 minutes to deliver a snarky and totally-irrelevant rant against Hillary Clinton, with a reminder that a Clinton presidency would mark a new chapter in the attack on citizen-owned guns. And then at about the ten-minute mark, after our two hosts are joined by Billy Johnson who regularly delivers conservative tirades against gun control on NRA webcasts, the show becomes just another vehicle for attacking Mike Bloomberg and his attempts to use “government” to tell us all “how to run our own lives.”

Up until the anti-Bloomberg rant, I thought the show was making some headway into changing the image of the NRA from a hard-core, politicized advocacy organization into something that a younger, less politically-committed generation might find easier to accept. But if the producers of Noir really believe they have figured out a way to blend the NRA message into the Mellennial lifestyle, then all I can say is ‘good luck.’ I don’t know how much the shows’s sponsors, Daniel Defense and Mossberg, anted up to get their logos splashed onto the screen, but I can’t imagine that this show will gain them much of a following among the consumer population that is just coming of age.

One last point: the show also contained a segment called ‘Gun Pads’ in which guns, mostly assault-style rifles, are stacked like furnishings on pianos, tables, and other locations within a swankily-furnished home. Colion refers to this as a new kind of ‘decor’ that gun owners should present to people who visit their homes, but what was interesting about the display was that not a single one of the firearms had either a lock or any other kind of safety device. You would think that after after a major rant against Bloomberg and other gun-control advocates for always “telling gun owners how to behave,” that this NRA show would have had the good sense to at least promote gun safety to an audience that might not feel that comfortable around guns. You would think….

Hey Rand - Time To Stop Scamming Gun Owners

May 12, 2024

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Last week NRA members, myself included, received a letter from Senator Rand Paul, asking us to donate to The National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR), an organization which, according to its website, is the fastest-growing gun rights organization in the United States. Senator Paul’s letter, which is the second I have received soliciting funds for the lobbying efforts of the NAGR, led off with a quote from President Obama stating that he would use “whatever power this office holds” to ban guns. The fundraising appeal then goes on to list the usual scare-mongering attacks on Biden, Feinstein and the rest of the liberal, anti-gun crowd.

There’s only one little problem. The President never said what Rand Paul claims he said. He didn’t even come close. What he said, right after Sandy Hook, was that he would use the powers of his office to “engage my fellow citizens in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this.” Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to paint Barack Obama as a friend of the gun lobby. He’s not. But it seems to me that a United States senator, particularly one who is evidently running to succeed Obama in the White House, needs to be a little more careful with the words he uses.

paulOn the other hand, Rand Paul’s fundraising appeal struck me as a bit more strange than just the fact that he misquoted the president because the letter had Paul’s return address as being in Virginia, and I thought he was from Kentucky. But it turns out that the letter wasn’t sent from Paul at all; it was actually produced by a political PR firm called Saber Communications, whose address is the same town in Virginia which is the headquarters of the NAGR.

So here we have a very interesting three-way connection between a putative presidential candidate, a PR firm that does work for the candidate and a so-called advocacy group that claims to represent the interests of gun owners nationwide. What exactly is this advocacy group known as NAGR? Turns out it was founded in 2001 by a conservative political operative in Colorado named Dudley Brown, who used to claim that he graduated from Colorado State University when, in fact, henever graduated from Colorado State or anywhere else. Brown operated primarily at the state level until he was able to piggy-back onto Glenn Beck, the Tea Party and any other right-wing group to which he could attach his organization’s name.

In addition to tirelessly sending out fundraising appeals, the NAGR also has an affiliated PAC which ostensibly lobbies in Washington on issues involving gun rights. In a press release of October, 2013, Brown claimed that his group spent more than $1 million and “led the effort against gun control” on Capitol Hill. But I’m not sure if the money spent by NAGR went into political campaigns, or lobbying efforts, or is being spent primarily on phony and misleading fundraising appeals like the one I recently received. I took a look at NAGR’s tax return for 2010, and of the $1.6 million in revenue for that year, direct lobbying was $118,000 but nearly $1 million went for internet marketing and direct mail. And I’ll bet that most of that dough was paid to Saber Communications whose owner, Michael Rothfield, sits on the NAGR Board.

The attempt to generate income for a for-profit PR operation by chasing gun owners for donations hasn’t escaped the attention of gun folks, many of whom consider NAGR to be nothing more than a fundraising scam. Gun owners tend to be careful with their money, so comments made about NAGR on such gun blogs as AR-15.com,Smith & Wesson Forum and Gun Broker Forum. Com should alert Senator Paul to the fact that a population he considers to be solidly in his corner won’t be there much longer if he doesn’t polish up his act and stop allowing the NAGR to use his name just to enlarge the revenues of a privately-held PR firm.

SCOTUS Reaffirms The 2nd Amendment - In The Home.

May 6, 2024

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Even though there are a lot of people lining up for concealed-carry permits in California, Illinois and other places where more lenient guidelines for issuing CCW is no longer the exception but has become the rule, the Supreme Court on Monday let stand a federal appellate decision in New Jersey which upheld the state’s restrictive guidelines for carrying a concealed weapon outside the home. The case had been brought by the owner of a string of ATM kiosks, who argued that the necessity to carry large amounts of cash to run his business met the state’s requirement that he show an “urgent necessity” for self-protection, even though the New Jersey law doesn’t specifically mention that protection should extend to cover a business rather than a personal need for self defense.

The plaintiff’s case, of course, drew support and briefs from the usual 2nd Amendment suspects, including the Cato Institute, the 2nd Amendment Foundation and, of course, the NRA. I didn’t notice, incidentally, that the NRA’s website that carries daily stories about laws and legislation of interest to gun owners went out of its way to discuss this case. In fact, today’s headline on the website was all about the “weakness” of the anti-gun movement, while the failure of the SCOTUS to extend 2nd Amendment protections to CCW was barely mentioned on an inside page. Frankly, I don’t blame the NRA for doing its best to ignore the Court’s action; if I were in the business of trying to convince America that carrying a gun around outside the home is as patriotic as can be, I’d also try to ignore court rulings to the contrary, particularly rulings that fly directly in the face of an expansive fantasy about what the 2nd Amendment really means.

scaliaThis fantasy is expressed most clearly by a comment about the SCOTUS denial found on the Cato website, which states that: “regarding the right to self defense, the Supreme Court in Heller declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual constitutional right.” But that’s not exactly what the Court said. What Scalia said was this: “In sum, we hold that the District’s ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment , as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense.”

Now I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that if the Supreme Court states that the 2nd Amendment grants the right of using a gun for self defense within the home, and bases this decision both on legal precedent and historical references, then you may not like it, you may want to see it changed, but the definition of the 2nd Amendment as giving people the right to self-defense with a gun in their home is what the Constitution allows you to do. There is nothing in the New Jersey law that SCOTUS upheld that makes it difficult for any resident of New Jersey to buy a gun and keep it ready for use in their home. To state that the Constitution gives us the ‘right’ to gun ownership without any strings attached is a cynical and deliberate twisting of what the the Supreme Court and Antonin Scalia actually said.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against concealed carry and I have trained more than 2,000 residents in my state in the required safety course which allows them to apply (and usually receive) CCW without having to justify it on any special grounds. But the attempt by the NRA and its friends like Cato to pretend that Americans have a non-existent ‘right’ to walk around with a gun is made up of whole cloth. But creating a good argument out of nothing more than what you want to believe is hardly a novel exercise on both sides of the gun debate. After all, why should facts ever get in the way of a strongly-held opinion, right?

When Is A Homicide Always A Homicide? Try Using A Gun.

May 6, 2024

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One area in which behavior that results in serious medical conditions has remained largely outside the purview of public health regulation and research concerns injuries caused by accidents with guns. Most gun injuries that result in deaths aren’t accidents. They were caused by people who consciously decided to use a gun on themselves or someone else. Together. suicides and homicides account for 98% of annual gun deaths; accidental or unintentional deaths account for only 2% of the total. At least this is what the numbers look like that are published by the CDC. In 2010, the last year for which we have complete numbers, gun suicides were 19,392, gun homicides were 11,078 and unintentional gun deaths were 606; the last number, as Ralph Cramden used to say on The Honeymooners, a mere “bag of shells.”

But now we have a very different argument being made by Michael Luo and Mike McIntire of the New York Times, who believe that the way in which coroners and other public health officials treat and report fatal gun injuries seriously undercounts the number of accidental gun deaths that occur each year. In their article, published last September, the reporters dug into specific, coroner-level gun death reports in four different states and discovered that as many as half of the gun mortalities that were reported as homicides were, in fact, unintentional or accidental, a finding which if true for the entire country, would make a substantial difference in the ratio of homicides to accidents and might undercut a major argument on gun safety promoted by the gun industry and the NRA.

Why is there such a discrepancy in how gun deaths occur as opposed to how they are reported? Because in many states and localities, any shooting of one person by another, regardless of age, is considered a homicide. Or sometimes the same office will rule one accidental shooting as a homicide and the next one as an accident. Luo and McIntire give examples of both, including a “homicide” in Texas where a 9-month-old was killed when his two-year-old brother opened a dresser drawer next to the crib, pulled out a gun and banged away. Now I can’t imagine that even in Texas they could figure out how to execute a two-year-old for murder, but I also suspect that the parents weren’t charged with neglect, or abuse, or anything else. Texas, along with a majority of other states, has no law requiring that guns be locked or locked away in the home, remember?

childsafeOf course if you listen to the NRA touting it’s Eddie Eagle program or the NSSF promoting its ChildSafe safety kits, you would think that the entire decline in unintentional gun injuries was due to them. And in fact there has been a decline in accidental gun deaths over the last decade, from 726 in 2000 to 606 in 2010 (although the rate of gun injuries over the same period has gone up.) But the question that emerges from Luo and McIntire’s reportage is whether the morbidity data that the gun industry uses to pat itself on the back for its safety initiatives really tells us whether gun owners are being safe, or whether coroners and other medical workers are just playing fast and loose with different definitions of how gun accidents really occur?

These issues might be resolved and we could finally understand the true degree to which Americans suffer from unwise use of guns if politicians like Rand Paul would stop pandering to the NRA faithful and withdraw their cynical opposition to guns and public health. I don’t blame the NRA for trying to hold the line against physicians or anyone else who might seek to limit or regulate the market for guns. After all, they represent the gun industry, and when was the last time that any industry came out in favor of government controls? But it’s nothing short of disgraceful when a politician who also happens to be a licensed physician could pretend that public health should play no role in how Americans use their guns. Note: I didn’t say that public health should make the rules. But public health should be able to explain gun accidents when there are no rules at all.

Can The NRA Sell Their Message To The Millennial Generation?

May 5, 2024

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Even though violent crime has declined by more than 50% over the last twenty years, it’s not surprising that Wayne LaPierre and other promoters continue to justify gun ownership as our first, last and most sacred form of personal defense. After all, guns are found most frequently on farms, rural communities and smaller towns. Bye-bye farms and rural living, bye-bye guns. Thirty years ago a majority of small arms manufactured in the United States were rifles and shotguns; now more than 60% are handguns and the percentage would be even higher were it not for a surge in assault-style rifles which are often sold as weapons that can be used by the ‘good guys’ to keep the ‘bad guys’ out of sight.

Going forward the news for the gun industry and its advocacy organizations like the NRA doesn’t hold any silver linings, at least any that can be found in a very detailed poll conducted by the Pew Foundation on the outlook of the Millennial generation, aka, persons aged 18 to 29. The Pew poll summed up Millennials as follows: “They are more ethnically and racially diverse than older adults. They’re less religious, less likely to have served in the military, and are on track to become the most educated generation in American history. Their entry into careers and first jobs has been badly set back by the Great Recession, but they are more upbeat than their elders about their own economic futures as well as about the overall state of the nation.”

Wow. That’s hardly the profile of the NRA stalwarts who gathered last week in Indianapolis to hear Wayne LaPierre, Chris Cox, Oliver North and the other harbingers of doom tell them that the country was quickly going to hell in a handbasket and that only a gun and a good dose of patriotism would keep the criminal hordes away from knocking down their doors. In the first four minutes of her speech, Sarah Palin referred to the anti-gun threat sixteen times and made it clear that only a Republican sweep in November would guarantee American freedom and basic rights. And what did the audience look like that whooped and hollered as these well-worn bromides were being served? Mostly male, mostly 50 or older and totally White.

The NRA and the gun industry have done a really great job making that kind of audience feel like they are under attack. They’ve done an equally good job pushing the idea that modern life is fearful and fear can be overcome if you own a gun. The problem is, that even after a prolonged recession when many younger people had great difficulty finding jobs, the Millennials are the most optimistic and the least fearful of all population groups, and remain the most convinced that their future dreams will come true. They aren’t tying these thoughts to a Republican win in November; they see the world through their own eyes, and those eyes aren’t focused on the NRA.

If Millennials maintain this very distinct world view as they get older, the problem of gun violence may take care of itself. Because even though many younger people think that guns are “cool,” (after all, they were raised on video-games,) they don’t see the world as a dark or forbidding place. And it’s that dark and dangerous world that the gun industry and the NRA has been using to sell more guns since everyone started leaving the farm.

evolve-badgeWant to see the kind of gun message that Millennials will like? Take a look at this video produced by my friends Jon and Rebecca Bond for their organization called Evolve. It’s, hip, it’s cool, it delivers a serious point about guns but makes it in a clever and sophisticated way. I have never seen a message like this coming from the gun industry because they haven’t figured out how to speak to the generation that will either become or not become their customers and supporters in the years ahead. And if they don’t figure out how to do it the Bonds and other Millennial-conscious organizations will end up owning the debate.

Want To Read A Good Book About Guns? Here It Is And I Didn’t Write It.

May 4, 2024

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Philip Cook and Kristin Goss have published a very important book which deserves everyone’s attention for two reasons: First, the authors are without doubt two of the best-informed and serious gun scholars publishing today, and second, they have written a very balanced and well-documented essay that objectively summarizes the state of the gun argument on both sides of the debate. The Gun Debate is a book that needs to be read and then discussed seriously, which is what I am going to do right now.

cookWhat I like most of all about the book is that the authors, as they cover each and every point, are careful to demonstrate that there’s a kernel of truth in every argument presented by both sides regarding the good news and bad news about guns. Whether it’s the pro-gun position that guns protect us against crime, or the anti-gun position that more guns equals more violent crime, Cook and Goss are careful to show that there’s at least some data that either side can use to bolster their point of view. In other words, what we finally get in the gun debate is a book that sets out to be balanced in the hopes, according to the authors, “that there’s still a possibility of a reasoned discussion based on the best available information.” The foregoing is how the book ends and there’s no question that by the time you get to that closing sentence, you will have been treated to the best available information. The book really is that good.

But here’s the bad news. In aspiring to produce a work that treats both points of view seriously and objectively, the authors assume a degree of parity in terms of the motivations and objectives of both sides in the gun debate which simply isn’t true. The tip-off in this respect is the frequent use of the words like ‘scholar’ or ‘scholarship’ when referring to articles and books published by authors whose positions on issues can be basically described as pro-NRA. For example, they refer to the “terrible oversight” committed by historians who paid little attention to gun control policies as an aspect of the consolidation of Nazi power after 1933, an omission now thankfully corrected by the “scholarship” of a self-proclaimed expert on Constitutional gun law named Stephen Halbrook. He has been peddling this Nazi nonsense for years, and it is brandished about by the NRA as part of their ‘slippery-slope‘ strategy to shoot down gun control regulations of any sort. The reason why historians have ignored this aspect of the Nazi regime is that it is of no consequence in explaining how and why the most educated and advanced society in Western Europe could embrace a government that was based on such savagery and hate. One doesn’t become a ‘scholar’ simply by writing about something that real scholars have decided doesn’t need to be discussed.

The strength of the NRA lies in the fact that they represent a constituency which, when it comes to gun control, has something tangible to lose; namely, their guns. You can dress it up any way you choose - fighting for America’s freedoms, fighting for civil rights, fighting for family values. But none of those fights would engage even a fraction of the current NRA membership if behind all those battles wasn’t the possibility that their guns would be taken away. And to the author’s credit, they understand why this tangible loss faced by gun owners far outstrips the theoretical gains that gun control would yield for the other side.

The NRA and its pro-gun allies has absolutely no interest in supporting real scholarship or coming to the table for a ‘reasoned’ debate. Because abandoning their hard-core, extremist position would mean they were perhaps willing to admit the possibility that the other side had something worthwhile to say. In which case, what’s the point of being a pro-gun advocate at all? If only 25 percent of Americans own guns, then the job of the NRA and its ‘scholar’ allies is to figure out how to get guns into the hands of the other 75 percent. Isn’t that what the gun debate is really all about?

 

 

Guns And Millennials: Which Way Will It Go?

May 1, 2024

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In February the Center for American Progress, which is Washington’s pre-eminent liberal think tank, jumped into the gun debate by holding a national conference attended by all the usual suspects (Bloomberg, Coalition Against Gun Violence, et. al.,) and issuing a report which described a “crisis” of youth gun violence. The report is basically old wine in a new bottle and doesn’t really say anything that can’t be found in any number of other gun control reports, but since CAP often defines the issues that sooner or later end up spearheading the liberal legislative agenda, it’s worthwhile to take a look at the details, which I’m sure have also been read with interest at the headquarters of the NRA.

capAccording to the CAP report, of everyone killed by guns each year, one in five was 24 years old or younger, making gun death the second most common form of morbidity for this age group, surpassed only by motor vehicle accidents. Actually, the number and rate of guns deaths has been pretty steady or declining slightly since 2000, while car accident deaths for people under age 25 has dropped by nearly 30% during the same period. On the other hand, vehicle deaths held steady and actually increased between 1990 and 2000, whereas young gun deaths declined more than 20% during that same period. So first it was gun deaths that declined significantly for ten years and then stabilized, then car deaths dropped and likewise stabilized, with the two trends running very similar numbers since 2010.

Why was there such a significant decline in young gun deaths between 1994 and 1999? The truth is, we don’t know. Even though homicides usually account for less than 3% of all violent crimes, they tend to follow other crime trends and violent crime in the United States dropped significantly in every category between 1993 and 1999. Why did this happen? There are lots of theories out there, from aggressive policing to increased jail populations, to removing lead from paint, less unwanted babies after Roe vs. Wade, and God knows what else. Perhaps the decline in violent crime occurred for all those reasons, but the truth is that we simply don’t know.

One thing we do know is that the decline in gun violence before 2000 and its stabilization in the years since then occurred in the absence of any new gun control legislation at all. The NICS background check system wasn’t operating in any comprehensive sense until 1998, which is when the decline in gun violence began to slow down. For that matter, while the authors of the CAP report bemoan the fact that gun deaths are “failing to go down,” one could turn this completely around and wonder why gun deaths haven’t gone back up? This is a particularly vexing question given the fact that gun violence remains stable at a time when more guns are being manufactured and sold than at any time in the history of American small arms.

Don’t get me wrong. The fact that a group of Millennials came together to organize a grass-roots movement aimed at their peers, particularly the college-age population, is a wonderful antidote to the fear-mongering and glorification of the “armed citizen” that the NRA cynically uses to promote gun sales. And maybe the Millennials will be the first generation since my generation (I’m a pre-Boomer) to once again embrace the traditional notions of guns as necessary for hunting and sport but not much else.

On the other hand, I hope that the CAP and its legislative followers won’t just seize on this document to promote yet another round of political hand-wringing that will no doubt result in little, if anything, getting done. I’m all for solutions to public health issues whose origins, incidence and impact we truly understand. We know how many people are killed by guns every year, but I have yet to see a convincing study that explains why some people who have access to guns point them at themselves or others and pull the trigger, but most of the gun-owning population leaves the gun alone. Like Walter Mosley says, “If you carry a gun, it’s bound to go off sooner or later.”

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