Who’s To Say Whether I Should Carry A Gun?

June 19, 2024

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The NRA decided years ago that there’s no seat at the table for physicians when the committee hearing or the funding agency gets together to talk about guns. They don’t even want physicians talking to their own patients about guns and they certainly don’t want the Surgeon General ever to say anything about guns. But while such aggrieved nonsense may play well with the NRA faithful, particularly repeated by a putative Presidential candidate, those who live in the real world know that we all need a physician when it comes time to make critical decisions about our health.

One of the critical health decisions for which people might need medical counsel is whether or not to carry a gun. Now I know that the pistoleros who spend every vacation sharpening their skills at shoot-em-up amusement parks like Gunsite or Thunder Ranch don’t need help deciding whether their eye-hand coordination will let them emerge victorious from the fray, but there must be plenty of people among the eight million Americans now holding CCW privileges who don’t have the physical or mental dexterity that handling a lethal weapon requires.

paul Even though a majority of now states issue CCW on a “shall” (required) rather than a “may” (discretionary) basis, there are hardly any states that do not grant the official issuing CCW the authority to deny a permit if the applicant, regardless of legal background, might use a weapon to endanger himself or someone else. The NRA would probably say that one of their local members should be consulted in cases like this, but you and I know that the licensing authorities will turn to a physician because a doctor is the only professional they can really trust.

But this brings up a little problem. Because it turns out that many physicians don’t trust themselves to make competency decisions about whether people should own or carry guns. The American College of Physicians conducted a poll which revealed that two-thirds of its members didn’t counsel their patients on firearms because they didn’t know enough about how to treat patients at risk for misusing their guns. A similar poll conducted by the American College of Emergency Physicians in 2013 said the same thing.

We now have a new poll that asked physicians in North Carolina whether they felt comfortable responding to requests from county sheriffs who needed to verify the physical or mental competency of someone wanting to carry a gun. This poll, of whom one-third of the respondents indicated they owned guns, found that 60% of the physicians did not feel they could “adequately assess” whether their patient was physically capable of carrying and using a concealed gun, and nearly 50% felt they could not determine CCW competency on mental grounds. As for those who think that the medical profession has been cowed into submission by the lunacies of a self-certified Kentucky opthamologist and a small, pro-gun fringe, a majority of the respondents did not believe that the doctor-patient relationship would suffer if they didn’t certify the patient as being fit to carry a gun.

The real knowledge deficit created by defunding CDC gun research is not whether guns are a medical risk. The bigger issue is the fact that, when confronted with a patient possibly at risk to commit (or be the victim of) gun violence, many physicians don’t know what to say or do. Now that the American Medical Association has just endorsed the idea of medically-accredited gun violence education, perhaps the gap will begin to close. And if anyone out there thinks their physician is now their enemy because he wants to talk about guns, perhaps you should make an appointment for your next checkup with Doctor Rand Paul.

Never Hurts To Hear Another Point Of View

June 19, 2024

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Another gun blogger, Bluegrass Bruce, sent me a link to his blog which has a different point of view on the Abramski decision. I posted a comment about Abramski and Bluegrass Bruce had a different point of view which I am happy to post below. I am always willing and able to exchange views with people whose views differ from mine. Never got hurt by an opinion, right?

Bluegrass Bruce

Bluegrass Bruce

 

The Supreme Court’s Overkill

On Monday, the Supreme Court struck down a challenge from a former police officer named Bruce Abramski, who was convicted of “straw purchasing” after he bought a handgun on behalf of his uncle.

Despite the fact that Abramski’s uncle is an eligible gun owner and Abramski transferred the gun through a federally licensed firearms dealer, the Court upheld his conviction.

Abramski’s challenge said that it should be legal for one registered gun owner to purchase a gun on behalf of another eligible gun owner — especially if it is done through the proper channels. (Before taking control of the gun, Abramski’s uncle also passed all of the necessary background checks.)

Yet for the Supreme Court, that wasn’t enough. It ruled that Abramski should also have listed his Uncle’s name on the forms when he made the original purchase.

Tell me something — how does this kind of bureaucratic overkill prevent criminals from getting guns?

It doesn’t — and preventing crime is not the Court’s true intent.

In the majority opinion, Justice Elena Kagan wrote:

“[Federal gun law] establishes an elaborate system to verify a would-be gun purchaser’s identity and check on his background. It also requires that the information so gathered go into a dealer’s permanent records… And no part of that scheme would work if the statute turned a blind eye to straw purchases.”

Protecting this ‘scheme’ is all that the liberals on the Court really care about.

Just like all the other liberals in Washington, their only goal is to control gun ownership any way they can.

There’s Plenty Of Gun Research That We Can Do Without Anyone Losing Their Guns

June 18, 2024

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The New York Times just called for a resumption of public health research on guns, noting that Congressman Jack Kingston (R-GA), whose sub-committee holds the research purse-strings, continues to oppose such funding for the CDC. Kingston, like many members of the GOP, has been facing political opposition from the right and now, while running for the Senate, is facing some serious problems about the source of some campaign cash, so the last thing he’s about to stack more problems on his plate, particularly any backlash from the NRA. But I think there may be a way to package gun research that would meet the current agendas of both sides, and move beyond the name-calling and vitriol that erupts whenever gun issues are the subject of public debate.

U.S. Rep Jack Kingston

For example, let’s look at the question of mental illness and guns. The NRA believes that we need to “fix” the mental health system in order to keep guns out of the wrong hands. They are never very specific about what such a fix would entail, as long as it doesn’t in any way impede the ability of “normal” folks to acquire or use guns. The gun control side will tell you that serious mental illness is not really linked to violent behavior, which means we don’t need to control the people, we need to control the guns.

Here is where some more research needs to be done that really shouldn’t upset either side. For example, more than 50% of all suicides in the United States are committed with guns, a percentage that climbs to 80% among suicide victims above the age of 65. Back in 1992, Arthur Kellerman led a team that did some research which appeared to indicate that people who lived in homes with firearms had a higher rate of suicide than people who residences were gun-free. But Kellerman only counted suicides that took place in the home, whereas people who committed suicide away from their homes also had an elevated suicide rate if they used a gun. Wouldn’t it be helpful to conduct a study of gun suicides outside the home to see when and where the gun was used? Wouldn’t such a study help us to better understand the degree to which the immediate impulse to commit suicide is helped or not by access to a gun?

Here’s another example. Garen Wintemute recently published some data which showed that in California, felons who pleaded down to a misdemeanor which still allowed them to purchase a gun had a much higher rate of gun violence subsequent to their conviction than people whose sentence kept them in a prohibited category and thus unable to legally acquire a gun. The NRA keeps talking about the fact that gun violence is only committed by bad guys with guns. But if someone were to extend Wintemute’s findings to a representative sample for the country as a whole, couldn’t such research then be used to revise the category of prohibited persons for gun ownership not to just include felons but to include persons convicted of certain misdemeanors as well?

I’m not a public health scholar, but it seems to me that just within the two examples cited above, there’s plenty of research to do. And it’s research that would in no way negatively impact the 2nd Amendment rights of anyone to own or acquire a gun. If the House Committee chaired by Congressman Kingston can tell the CDC what kind of research they can’t fund, there’s no reason why they can’t tell them what they should try to fund. Unless, of course, the real agenda is to keep evidence-based discussions outside the purview of guns, because just yelling back and forth is a guarantee that nothing will ever get done.

The NRA Loses Another One

June 17, 2024

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There have been rumors floating around DC that some kind of gun-control legislation may come back to the Senate later this year. And if this proves to be the case, it will probably involve another attempt to widen federal background checks to include private gun transactions, a move that was defeated in the gun control debate that broke out in 2013 after Sandy Hook. But a case was decided by the Supreme Court yesterday which, had the 5-4 vote gone the other way, might have made the whole background check system null and void.

Elena Kagan

I am referring to Abramski vs United States, which involved a Virginia resident, Bruce Abramski, who was convicted of committing a “straw” purchase of a Glock 19 because he answered ‘yes’ on the background check form 4473 when asked if the gun was being purchased for himself. In fact, he purchased the gun for his uncle, a resident of Pennsylvania, who sent him the money because Abramski was able to pay a discount price for the gun at a store near his own home. Abramski then took the gun to Pennsylvania, gave it to his uncle who gave him a receipt. The receipt turned up in Abramski’s possession when his home was searched by police investigating an unrelated offense and it was this receipt that led to his ultimate conviction for lying on the 4473.

Abramski based his appeal on the idea that he had not committed a “straw” purchase because his uncle could have passed a background check had the uncle chosen to purchase the gun. The statute covering the background check system, after all, was designed to keep guns out of the hands of people who could not pass a background check, which was not true in this case. Abramski also contended that it really didn’t matter what he did with the gun, as long as he could pass a background check at the point of sale.

The Court majority, in an opinion written by Elena Kagan, found that Abramski’s entire argument rested on only one true fact, namely that he was able to pass a background check at the point of sale. But to find in favor of Abramski’s larger argument, according to Kagan and the majority, “would undermine—indeed, for all important purposes, would virtually repeal—the gun law’s core provisions.” In other words, this case really was about whether or not the government could regulate firearm transactions at all, not just about the behavior of a particular individual at the time he purchased a gun.

The minority dissent, written by Scalia, was very interesting insofar as it dealt with the entire issue only in the most narrow terms. Rather than take on the larger question of whether the government has the right to regulate gun ownership, Scalia chose to argue about whether the 4473 (and the statute behind it) properly defined both the intent and the legal sanctions involved for making a false statement on the form. And even though Abramski’s appeal was joined by 26 states and, of course, the NRA, there was little in Scalia’s dissent that could give them cause for hope. I’m hardly surprised that Justice Scalia refused to challenge the government’s authority to regulate the ownership of small arms, because he acknowledged and approved such regulatory power in the Heller decision of 2008.

Last month the DC District Court upheld the District of Columbia’s tough gun registration law, aka Heller II. And now the SCOTUS upholds the law that created the whole background check system as it was first developed in 1968. On its own website, the NRA didn’t even bother to make a statement about the Abramski case, other than to link readers to a story about the decision in the, of all places, Washington Post! I don’t know the extent to which Court decisions necessarily reflect the prevailing mood, but if a new gun control bill comes back to Congress later this year, I’m not quite ready to declare it dead.

A Gun Control Activist Reflects On His Battles With The NRA

June 16, 2024

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The Wall Street Journal carried an interesting interview this morning with Mark Glaze who, until Michael Bloomberg and Shannon Watts combined to form Everytown, was the Executive Director of Bloomberg’s first gun-control group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns. I’m not sure whether this group ever had a clear objective for what it wanted to do; some of its research efforts were outstanding, some were duds, there didn’t seem to be any attempt to forge a unified and active voice among the city mayors who comprised the membership, and their lobbying efforts in Washington certainly never paid off. But that’s all history now as Everytown seems to be ramping up for the next round, meanwhile Mr. Glaze sat down with a WSJ reporter to reflect on what he had and hadn’t done.

What I found most interesting in his comments was an attempt to tie the failure of gun control in Washington to other issues that have nothing to do with guns. In particular, Glaze focused on the controversy about NSA spying that emerged in the flight and prosecution of Anthony Snowden, as well as the botched roll-out of the website that prevented people from signing on to the ACA. To quote Glaze: “There’s an almost perfect overlap, I think, between the people who are the most active and radicalized gun voters and people who just don’t like and trust the government very much.”

acaThe fact that both the website mess and Snowden’s revelations occurred long after the post-Sandy Hook gun control bill was dead and buried doesn’t really negate his general point of view. The NRA has been attacking the Federal government’s alleged whittling away of gun rights for the last twenty years, in particular whenever a Democratic administration tries to enact even the most mild gun reforms. In fact, the gun bill that was ultimately voted down in 2013 was a much less draconian measure - in terms of the scope of government regulation - than what Clinton got through the Congress in the form of the Brady Bill in 1993 and the assault weapons ban in 1994.

Glaze shouldn’t be faulted for seeing only the tip of the iceberg because his vantage-point for understanding the behavior of the NRA is, by definition, the very narrow perspective that surrounds anyone who’s work ties them to hanging around DC. The truth is that what makes the NRA so formidable is not the care and attention they lavish on elected officials in Washington (what they hand out for political campaigns is a tiny fraction of what other industries like banking and lawyers shell out every two years) but their efforts at the state level to promote issues like LTC.

In 1994, following passage of Brady, less than half the states operated under laws that made it relatively easy to qualify for concealed-carry permits, a number which has swelled to include just about every state, even though the Supreme Court explicitly stated that the 2nd Amendment did not cover carrying a gun outside the home for self defense when they ruled for Heller in 2008. And while there are still a few jurisdictions, particularly large cities like Washington, New York and Chicago where LTC is basically not issued, probably 90% of all Americans, particularly in areas where everyone owns a gun, can qualify to carry a gun on their person with about as much difficulty as they would encounter in acquiring a license to operate a small boat.

If the NRA has been the main voice preventing more gun control in Washington, it’s because out in the hinterlands most of us can walk around with a gun in our pocket and pretend that we are the “good guys” who are on the lookout to protect everyone else from the “bad guys” with guns. The fact that gun violence rates have stabilized or increased slightly in the years since LTC became the law of the land is one of those inconvenient facts that the NRA simply chooses to ignore. But nobody ever said that a successful advocacy campaign requires having the facts on your side. What the NRA knows how to do is reach gun owners in ways that really count, a strategy that the gun control folks still need to figure out.

 

The Politics Of Gun Control

June 15, 2024

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So here’s the big question: If Harry Reid makes good on his threat to bring a gun control bill back to the Senate this year, what’s the chance that it will pass? And the answer is: probably not very good. And the reason that it’s not very good isn’t because the NRA is such a behemoth in the halls of Congress that they always get their way. In fact, the NRA is very adept at taking credit for how the geography of gun ownership just happens to slant any national debate about gun control in their direction; a tilt that will probably continue for years to come. Here’s how it works.

Gun ownership in this country is skewed towards the West and the South. It is estimated that there are 27 states in which per capita gun ownership reaches 40% or more, with Western states like Montana and Wyoming probably having a gun in every home. Only one Republican Senator from any of these 27 states - Susan Collins, voted for Manchin-Toomey last year, and 4 Democratic Senators from these states broke ranks with their party and also voted against the bill.

reidThe NRA doesn’t have to waste any time or resources going after votes in the 23 states that have per capita gun ownership of less than 40 percent. All they have to do is make sure they can find enough votes in the ‘gun-rich’ states to kill any bill on the Senate floor. And they also don’t have to spend all that much money on grass roots campaigns, telling their supporters to “flood” Congress with phone calls, emails and the like. Because together, these 27 states where gun ownership is so prevalent count less than 90 million residents; in other words, when it comes to national gun control, a majority of states hold less than 30 percent of the country’s population (and voters) as a whole.

The big problem facing gun control advocates at the federal level is that while the states that have the lowest per capita gun ownership contain a much larger overall population than the gun-rich states (these 11 states have nearly 120 million residents,) together they count only for 22 Senate votes, and that’s assuming that these 22 Senators are all Democrats, which they are not. So in order to get a gun control bill passed and sent to the House, the battle comes down to the votes of the 24 Senators who come from 12 states where gun owners aren’t a majority, including Texas, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Ohio, states which often send Republicans to the Senate who won’t break ranks with their party’s leadership over gun control anyway.

The NRA would love a big red turnout in November as a way of keeping Obama under control during the last two years of his second term. If this happens, both sides will spend every minute gearing up for the big one in 2016 and a gun control bill, along with probably every other piece of legislation, can go fly a kite. So in the short term, the battle over guns at the federal level will probably continue to favor the NRA. On the other hand, in the longer term, the same demographic geography that gives less than one-third of the country’s population a veto over new gun laws may also begin to favor the other side.

What the NRA cannot change is the fact that the country is becoming more urban, more ethnically and racially diverse, and more dependent on single-parent households, all demographics that have little or no interest in owning guns. You also don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that these changes will impact state legislatures and the shape of Congressional districts after the 2020 census which, following 2016, will only be four years away. Given all that, I’ll take the short odds on the NRA for the next couple of years, but by the end of this current decade I’m willing to bet that even in what are now gun-rich states, you’ll begin hearing a much different tune.

Everytown Vs. NRA: The Slugfest Begins

June 14, 2024

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When former Mayor Mike Bloomberg first announced that he was ponying up $50 million to fund gun control, it didn’t take the NRA long to react. They quickly published a long commentary on their NRA-ILA website that basically accused Bloomberg of buying his way into grass-roots advocacy by creating the illusion of a mass movement through “slickly-produced” television ads and other media-driven appeals. The NRA glossed over the fact that some of Bloomberg’s money would go to augment the work of Shannon Watts and her Moms Demand Action campaign which has certainly become a national advocacy organization, even though the size of its membership doesn’t yet compare to the NRA.

I wrote a column on this blog when Bloomberg’s new campaign hit the wires in which I poured some cold water over his plan to fund political activity that would result in new gun control laws, particularly laws that widened the scope of background checks. But I focused more on whether the data on background checks really proved that it was an effective way to deal with gun violence, which I happen to believe is not the case. I didn’t think it was yet time to judge the degree to which fifty million bucks, no matter how it was spent, might tilt the gun-control playing field away from the NRA. But now I’m beginning to see the direction in which things seem to be going and I don’t think the news for the NRA is all that good.

bloomLast week Bloomberg’s newly-funded campaign, Everytown for Gun Safety, released a report on school shootings since Sandy Hook. The report painted a grim picture of more than one shooting per week, and within 24 hours this statistic was repeated by President Obama and immediately went viral on Youtube and everywhere else. The reaction to Obama’s comment was so intense on both sides was so intense that Politicfact.com ran one of its Pulitzer Prize-winning fact checks on the Everytown report and concluded that it “contained some elements of truth” but was “mostly false.” Their judgement was based on the report’s counting of every gun incident whether it involved shooting at unarmed students or school staff at all, even including shootings that took place on school playgrounds at night after the school was closed.

Yesterday I received an email letter from the NRA that linked to a story about the Everytown report that is now posted on the website of the NRA-ILA. And it was this email that made me begin to think that, when all is said and done, Bloomberg’s fifty million could make a difference in turning the advocacy tide against the NRA. Because the problem with the NRA’s response to the school shootings report is not that what the NRA said was incorrect (it wasn’t,) nor that they quoted other sources who are generally pro-NRA (they didn’t.) The real problem is that unless you are a member of the NRA you’ll never even read their response, and successful advocacy ultimately gets down to who will listen to you and who won’t.

Despite all the nonsense about internet “democracy” and the ability of grass-roots movements to use the “free” digital environment to promote their points of view, the fact is that when Bloomberg says something that’s repeated by Obama and goes into overdrive on the internet, the former Mayor of New York is getting his message out to a much wider audience than any group which listens to the NRA. Energizing gun owners to take sides in a pro-con debate over gun rights is a no-brainer that the NRA wins every time out. But getting non-gun owners, who are a majority of Americans, to understand and support the 2nd Amendment is a very different kettle of fish. The NRA better figure out how to do it or Bloomberg will get his control agenda on the cheap.

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