Between Bushmaster And Murthy It Wasn’t Such A Great Week.

December 17, 2024

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It hasn’t been such a great week for the gun business. First and most important, gun sales are really in the tank and don’t show any signs of improving. Ruger stock, which hit an all-time high of $85 a share back in January, closed yesterday at under $35. Smith & Wesson, which was at $17 in June, is now selling for around $9. Nobody expected these companies to maintain the sales numbers they posted over the last several years when everyone believed that a new gun bill would somehow squeak through in DC. But nobody also thought that the industry would bottom out so deep and so fast. I walked into a gun shop on the North Shore this past weekend and walked out with a Colt H-Bar AR-15 for a little over seven hundred bucks. It was used but mint and six months ago the same gun would have fetched at least a grand.

Talking about black guns, the long-rumoured lawsuit by parents of children shot by Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook was filed just before the deadline that would have made such wrongful-death claims null and void. The suit goes after Bushmaster, the manufacturer of the XL-15 that Lanza evidently used with terrible results the day he walked into the school. The good news for the plaintiffs is that Bushmaster is owned by a private investment group, Cerberus, which has some really deep pockets. The bad news is that the suit has to somehow get around the 2005 law which immunized gun makers from most claims of negligence or product liability and stymied other victims of mass shootings, such as the Aurora Theater massacre, from seeking damages from the gun maker even though suits against the theater and the seller of the ammunition used by James Holmes have gone forward.

Vivek Murthy, M.D.

Vivek Murthy, M.D.

What’s different about the Bushmaster suit, however, is that it takes issue with one of the most cherished missives in the gun industry, namely, the idea that the AR-15 is a perfectly-acceptable weapon for civilians because, as opposed to its military likeness, the M-16, it fires only one shot every time the trigger is pulled, whereas the M-16 is a machine gun that fires a massive amount of ordnance and therefore is unsuited and illegal for civilian use. The moment the lawsuit was filed, various gun experts began pushing the semi-auto versus the full-auto story to explain why the legal argument wouldn’t work. The only problem with the alleged difference between the M-16 and the AR-15 is that it’s simply not true. Most of the M-16 rifles currently carried by U.S. troops in Iraq and elsewhere are semi-auto guns (a small number can also shoot 3-shot bursts) because the military long ago discovered that automatic fire was not only inaccurate and a waste of ammunition, but also would heat up the barrel to unacceptable temperatures leading to battlefield failures of the gun. Bushmaster touts the sale of its rifles to the U.S. military on its website – the gun purchased by Nancy Lanza was one and the same thing.

The other piece of bad news for the industry was the confirmation of Vivek Murthy as Surgeon General, an appointment that was contested loudly and continuously by the NRA and its most ardent Senate supporters, in particular Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. These two guys started taking pot-shots at Murthy because they saw it as a quick and easy way to begin building support among the conservative, Republican base as a possible step towards a White House bid in 2016. The NRA has been trying to push physicians away from any discussion about guns because virtually every medical society has for years confirmed the bizarre idea that maybe, just maybe guns are a threat to health. Now the fact that more Americans have died from gun violence in the last ten years than died during World War II doesn’t mean that guns are necessarily harmful, does it? If you want to agree with the NRA on that one, you probably also believe that last week didn’t hurt the gun industry at all.

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Do Good Guys With Guns Stop Bad Guys? The Violence Policy Center Says No

December 12, 2024

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The Violence Policy Center has just released an update on its ongoing report about shootings committed by individuals with concealed-carry permits and the information deserves to be studied in detail. The issuance of CCW has been a hot-button issue for the ‘gun-rights’ movement ever since Gary Kleck published a study in 1994 which claimed that more than 2.5 million crimes were prevented every year by Americans walking around with guns. The gun industry and its allies like the NRA jumped on this still-unproven argument because, as Wayne-o said after Sandy Hook, “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” And since anyone with a concealed-carry permit is, by definition, one of the good guys, the gun industry and its supporters work overtime trying to get concealed-carry accepted as the law of the land.

The CCW movement has made great strides over the past twenty years. Back in 1990, less than 20 states gave residents concealed-carry permits except in response to applications which cited specific business need (security guards, carrying cash, etc.) Since that time, most state legislatures have passed laws that make concealed-carry no more onerous than what is required legally to keep a gun in the home, and a majority of CCW permits are issued with little or no training required at all. Not only is it easier to get CCW in most states, but a concealed gun can usually be carried into shopping malls, restaurants and bars.

vpc Even though violent crime rates have tumbled by more than half over the last twenty years, there’s no necessary connection, despite what the gun-rights lobby says, between this trend and the expansion of CCW, for the simple reason that more than 90% of the decline in violent crime occurred between 1993 and 2002, whereas the expansion in CCW took place largely over the last ten years. But what appears to have increased with the spread of CCW are the number of fatal shootings by individuals who were lawful CCW-holders at the time they committed these violent acts.

I’m not surprised if more CCW permits results in more gun shootings. After all, as the novelist Walter Mosley says, “If you walk around with a gun, it’s going to go off sooner or later.” Where the guns seem to go off sooner rather than later is in Florida, which recorded 68 killings by CCW-holders since 2007. This represents 10% of all CCW killings that the VPC was able to document which took place in a state that holds 3% of the nation’s total population. Admittedly the VPC numbers are incomplete, because like most efforts to understand gun violence, the data is fragmentary and based on partial media reports. VPC’s analysis also ignores gun suicides committed by legal gun owners, many of whom no doubt also had CCW privileges before they died.

I know many pro-gun activists who wouldn’t dispute the VPC numbers but would argue that an average of 100 fatal shootings each year by CCW-holders is a small price to pay for the thousands of fatal gun assaults that are prevented because law-abiding Americans can walk around with guns. I have been listening to this nonsense since 1994 when Kleck first published the results of his so-called research, but it was the VPC report that made me finally try and test whether this claim is true.

The FBI has been compiling data on justifiable homicides, defined as the killing of a felon during the commission of a felony, since 1994. In fact, since 2007, the same time-period covered by the VPC report, American civilians committed 1,023 justifiable homicides with handguns which, if you were to add CCW suicides to CCW homicides at best the whole thing would be a wash. The NRA and its allies have steadfastly refused to recognize the FBI data on justifiable homicide because the numbers, when compared to national CCW population, are pathetically small. No matter which way you cut it, the good guys ain’t doing such an impressive job with their guns.

Let’s Call Gun Control What It Really Is: Gun Control.

December 10, 2024

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In the aftermath of the successful campaign to extend background checks in Washington State, the gun-control movement will probably try to renew the push for background checks at the federal level, as well as on a state-by-state basis. In this regard, the Brady Organization sent out a press release touting the latest figures on background checks in a report compiled and published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics which shows, among other things, that the background check system has prevented 2.4 million sales of guns to what Brady calls “dangerous” people, a.k.a. individuals who could not pass a NICS check while attempting to purchase a gun.

Brady then goes on to quote from a Quinnipiac University poll conducted last July which found that 92 percent of voters, including gun owners, favored background checks on all gun sales, with even Republican voters calling for an expansion of background checks to the tune of 86-11 percent. This poll, and similar polls by Pew conducted after Sandy Hook, are so clearly contrary to what happened with the Senate bill that was defeated in 2013, that I was always suspicious of the claims about the ability of the NRA to strong-arm legislators at the federal level and kill gun-control legislation before it gets out of the gate. I could see where a gun bill, or any bill for that matter would probably fail in Congress if the public were more or less evenly split, as we seem to be on such issues as climate control or foreign affairs. But if 9 out of 10 voters in a representative and credible national poll claim to be in favor of expanded background checks and you can’t find 5 Republicans to join 55 Democrats to vote up the bill, then with all due respct to the muscle of the NRA, something’s clearly out of whack.

brady And where it appears to be out of whack is in the Quinnipiac poll itself, because every time the poll is referenced, the results of one additional question somehow, don’t ask me how, never seem to find their way into the media advisories that are sent out by the organizations that are promoting more background checks. And here’s the question which directly followed the questions on expanding background checks to cover private gun sales: “Are you in favor of stricter gun control laws?” And here’s the response: 50 percent said ‘yes’ and 47 percent said ‘no.’ In other words, basically a dead heat.

With all due respect to my friends in the gun safety movement, or the gun-control movement, or the common-sense movement , or whatever sobriquet they choose to use for the important and necessary work that they do, the gap between public perceptions about something called “background checks” and the whole issue of “gun control” needs to be addressed. Because the fact is that the NRA and its allies base their entire opposition to background checks on the idea that it represents a ‘slippery-slope’ which will eventually lead to complete gun control which will then lead to all the guns being taken away.

It’s a stupid and silly argument but the NRA rolls it out every time. The problem with polls that try to determine public attitudes about background checks is that the respondents are never asked whether they understand that background checks and gun control are one and the same thing. The fact is that ‘gun control’ has become a toxic phrase with certain groups, particularly gun owners, and you’re not going to win them over by pretending that forcing everyone to register every gun transaction is something other than what it really is. The NRA promotes gun ownership by claiming without a shred of valid evidence that guns protect us against crime. If our side wants to promote policies that will reduce gun violence, there’s no reason why we should be afraid to say what we really mean.

Everytown Updates Its Report On School Shootings And It’s A Must Read.

December 9, 2024

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Want to see one of the best and most penetrating videos on gun violence? Take a look at the new Everytown video that was mounted to coincide with the two-year anniversary of Sandy Hook. I haven’t seen any depiction of the stark reality of gun violence that beats this effort. The video is accompanied by a new report analyzing the nearly 100 school shootings that have occurred since Newtown, and is an updated version of the report on school shootings originally published earlier this year. Since this report, like the previous version, will no doubt come in for the usual slash-and-burn hysterics of the pro-gun crowd, I thought I would get my licks in first. So here goes.

The report is built on public (i.e., media) reports of school shootings defined as a gun being discharged within a school building or the campus around the facility. This would include shootings that take place in school playgrounds, school parking lots and other areas that are considered school property but are not enclosed within the school building(s) proper. Because it is based on media reports by definition it is incomplete and therefore has to be considered as representing a smaller number than the actual shootings that take place on school property.

everytown logo The report breaks down shootings between K-12 institutions and colleges/universities, noting that the number of shootings that occurred in the two environments was roughly the same, with 49 shootings in K-12 and 46 in colleges and universities. But while there were 18 shootings resulting in at least one injury on a college campus, as opposed to only 14 shootings that caused injuries suffered in K-12 institutions, the lower grades were much more deadly with 15 K-12 schools being the scene of gun homicides, whereas gun deaths occurred at only 8 college locations.

When Everytown’s previous report was issued in June, the pro-gun apologists immediately found all sorts of “inconsistencies” and “exaggerations” about the degree of danger posed by guns being used in and around educational institutions. The most bizarre statement came from a right-wing blogger named Charles Johnson who determined that the numbers were overstated because a “gang” shooting that took place on school property, like a playground, was not actually a school shooting per se, but was just a random act of violence that happened to take place on school property. But the fact is that most acts of violence are random; they take place between individuals who knew each other before the violence occurred and break out because one party or the other decides to escalate a dispute from a verbal to a physical altercation.

It really doesn’t change things because someone decides to bring a gun onto school property who doesn’t happen to attend that school. After all, Adam Lanza wasn’t a student at Sandy Hook Elementary when he opened fire on December 14, 2012. But what differentiated him from many school shooters was his age; i.e., the most difficult aspect of the Everytown report is the age breakdown of the shooters in the K-12 schools. While 60% were 17 years old or above, 40% were 16 years old or younger, with 3 shooters being 12 and one unbelievably age five. How in God’s name does a five-year-old tote a gun to school and then shoot it? For that matter, what can you say about twelve year old kids with live guns?

Earlier this year one of the so-called NRA commentators, Billy Johnson, posted a video in which he argued that teaching gun competency in school was as important as learning how to read and do math. It’s easy to dismiss such dopey rhetoric as pandering to the fringe of the pro-gun crowd. If the best the pro-gun community can come up with is to quibble over whether or not this shootings took place during the school day or that shooting involved students from a particular school, then they are making it clear that a serious and sober discussion about school violence is beyond their abilities or concern.

 

Breitbart Does What It usually Does About Guns - Gets It Wrong.

December 7, 2024

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I don’t usually waste anyone’s time with reactions to editorials or other commentary on the gun business because everyone’s entitled to their own opinion. But as the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed, “we are all entitled to our own opinion but not our own facts.” And every once in a while someone published an opinion that is so at variance with the facts about guns that I feel it almost to be a civic duty to set the facts straight. This is the case with an editorial published in the Brietbart News calling for the Republican-led Senate to repeal the “burdensome and frivolous” gun control law of 1968 which, according to the editorial’s author, prevents Americans from going to other states, purchasing a handgun and returning with the gun to the state in which they live.

According to the author, A.W. Hawkins, the 1968 Gun Control Act is a “burdensome and unnecessary” law because while at allows residents o one state to travel to another state to purchase a rifle, it prohibits the same kind of transaction as regards handguns. The author goes on to state that, “the arbitrary nature of the ban is evident in the fact that by law, a law-abiding citizen from one state can walk into a retail store and buy an AR-15, AK-47, or shotgun in another state.” Not only does this rob consumers of the opportunity to support a “national” consumer market for small arms, but is an example of a “freedom-crushing law” that the Republican majority was elected to remove or change.

control cartoon Let me break the news gently to Mr. Hawkins. The prohibition on interstate sales of handguns was not the handiwork of the Gun Control Act of 1968, it was codified in the National Firearms Act of 1938, which amended and extended provisions of the original National Firearms Act of 1934. The latter statute was passed to control the transfer and sale of automatic weapons, like the so-called ‘Tommy Gun’ that was used by the Capone mob and other gangsters during the Prohibition era, and then became props in all those Hollywood shoot-‘em-ups about Ma Barker, Alvin Karpis and Pretty Boy Floyd.

The 1938 National Firearms Act made it illegal for guns to move across state lines unless they were shipped from one gun dealer to another, a prohibition that covered all firearms and, for the first time required such dealers to acquire a license for interstate traffic in guns from the Treasury Department for the grand total of one dollar per year. The 1938 law also for the first time created certain categories of “prohibited persons.” Like felons and fugitives, who could not own guns. The only problem with the 1938 law was that it required dealers to record the sources of all firearms shipped to them from other states, but did not create any kind of regulatory process to verify or validate that dealers were actually maintaining such information.

The Gun Control Act of 1968 closed some of these loopholes by bringing all activities of gun dealers under the regulatory authority of the ATF. For the first time, dealers not only had to maintain records of the sources of their inventory, but also were required to utilize the Form 4473 for recording detailed personal information about individuals to whom they transferred guns. The dealer had to verify the gun recipient’s personal information by dint of a driver’s license or other standard type of ID. Most important, the ATF could visit any dealer, inspect these records, and therefore have access to information about everyone who purchased a gun.

I’m not saying that GCA1968 is a perfect law. Far from it. But at the very least it does codify the idea that certain types of people simply should not be allowed to get access to guns. The Brietbart editorialist isn’t against laws per se; he’s just doing what the pro-gun folks usually do whenever the discussion turns to guns -reduce the debate to the lowest, dumbest denominator because that’s the argument which the NRA can always win.

 

 

Can Gun Owners And Non-Gun Owners Agree? I’m Not So Sure.

December 4, 2024

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Last week I wrote a column about a report on a Fox affiliate station in York, PA that presented a very balanced view on whether physicians should talk to patients about guns. What was interesting was the fact that a television station covering what is a very politically-conservative, gun-rich region would actually run a story which seemed, on balance, to promote the idea that doctors should be able to inquire guns. Given the lengths to which the NRA has gone to muzzle doctors who want to discuss this issue with patients, I found it surprising that a somewhat “pro-doc” slant would come from Fox News.

docs versus glocks I wasn’t the only one who found it interesting because this post made it all over the web and was featured on sites owned by gun partisans on the Right and anti-gun partisans on the Left. I thought it would be instructive to look at these sites in a little more detail to get a flavor for how the average person, gun owner and non-gun owner, lined up on what has been a highly-contentious issue. And what I discovered didn’t leave me with any warm and fuzzies in terms of the degree to which either side in the gun debate understands what the other side is talking about.

Let’s look at the pro-gun side first, in this case a blog published by MN (for Minnesota) Gun Talk. The conversation began with a link to the story out of York, PA as replayed on Yahoo News. This was followed by 40 posts, but as is usual in such blogs, the majority written by just a couple of folks. And it goes without saying that even though the original story quoted two doctors as stating that they were asking about guns solely in terms of preventing gun accidents, none of the gun owners on this blog took the doctors at their word. For that matter it’s not clear that any of the bloggers even bothered to watch the clip from Yahoo News. For the most part they were too busy throwing the usual dumb comments and dumber profanity back and forth between themselves.

The other side of the gun fence was a website devoted to baby care, birthing and a host of other very compassionate issues which ran a story about Florida’s gag law in which the blogger was critical of any attempt to prevent physicians from talking to patients about guns. The story was followed by a reader’s poll in which readers who felt that pediatricians had the right to inquire about guns outnumbered readers who were against such inquiries by a ratio of six to one. Of the 185 comments that followed the story, they were overwhelmingly posted by readers who felt that their pediatrician was behaving properly in asking about guns, and a significant number of bloggers on this site admitted that they didn’t and wouldn’t own guns at all.

I find these websites much more revealing about the average person’s thoughts on gun issues than the pronouncements that come down from the formal, advocacy groups on both sides. Not that the views of the NRA are contrary to what their membership believes, nor would Brady or Everytown take a policy position that wouldn’t be favored by the supporters of those groups. But what you get from these blogs and websites is what individuals at the street-level are thinking, not what a professional media or communications staff feels will promote their agenda and point of view.

There’s only one little problem. I read all 40 posts on the pro-gun blog and nearly all of the 185 posts on the baby center site and I must say that the tone and content of the two threads were about as far away from each other as what I get when I look at content from Brady or the NRA. People who like guns are willing to accept and/or deny certain risks, and people who don’t like guns won’t accept those risks. And you’re not going to close this gap by pretending that there’s a way to make guns “safe.” That’s not what guns are designed to do.

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Do Guns Protect Us From Crime? The NRA Says Yes, The FBI Says No.

December 3, 2024

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Ever since the gun industry realized that hunting was a sport that was slowly disappearing, they have tried to convince Americans that owning a gun is the best and most affordable way to protect themselves from being the victims of a crime. This research that stood behind this marketing was first done by Gary Kleck, a criminologist in Florida, who figured out that people carrying guns prevented upwards of 2.5 million crime each year. He figured this out, incidentally, on the basis of a totally-bogus telephone poll that reached a whole, big 213 respondents, but never mind, the NRA began using this ‘guns prevent crime’ nonsense to promote the sale of guns.

Kleck’s work was ramped up to the next level by John Lott, an economist who trained with Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, who in 1997 published a book, More Guns, Less Crime, which argued that every time a jurisdiction changed the law and allowed people to carry concealed guns, the crime rate in that area went down. Maybe Kleck only interviewed 213 people for his study but at least he could show the raw data from his telephone poll. In the case of Lott, when other scholars asked him to produce his data so they could validate his results – ooops – the hard drive crashed and there was no data to be found. So we ended up with two studies, one which didn’t meet even the minimal standards for polling analysis, the other which may have been based on no real data at all, but the gun industry happily rolled these two bromides into a marketing campaign which remains the basic argument and justification for gun ownership today.

fbi Want the latest attempt to convince Americans that they should all go out and buy a gun to protect themselves from crime? Check out the new headline on the NRA-ILA website which says that the violent crime rate fell to another all-time low in 2013 while Americans kept buying more guns. According to the NRA, since 1991 violent crime decreased 19 of 22 years while, during the same period, Americans purchased 135 million new guns. This is basically the same story that the NRA ran in 2010, when they used the FBI crime report and said, “gun ownership rises to all-time high, violent crime falls to 35-year low.”

One of the most interesting aspects of the arguments for what I call the positive social utility of guns is how coincidence becomes causality, as if the fact that crime rates go down and gun ownership goes up have anything necessarily to do with one another. But when you create a world that is neatly divided between ‘good guys’ who use their guns to protect us from crime versus ‘bad guys’ who use guns to commit crimes, it’s easy to confuse coincidence with causality. Throw in the idea that the ‘bad guys’ not only include the criminals but also the elite, gun-grabbers of whom the most prominent happens to reside at 1600 Pennsylvania in Washington, DC, and you’ve got a solid argument for owning more guns, regardless of the facts of the case.

But I happen to find facts rather interesting, particularly when they don’t support a particular point of view. And in this case, if we go below the headlines and take a look at the FBI crime numbers, all of a sudden the argument about crime and guns doesn’t really add up. In 2012 the FBI recorded 12,765 homicides of which 8,855 were committed with guns. In 2013, total homicides were 12,253 with 8,454 guns. Yes, the homicide rate went down from 2012 to 2013, but the percentage of homicides committed with guns went up. The truth is that more people aren’t walking around with guns to protect us from crime; more people are using guns to commit the most violent crime of all. If that’s an argument for owning more guns, it sure beats hell outta me.

 

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