When It Comes To The Gun Debate, The Playing Field Is Beginning To Level Out.

March 20, 2024

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Until recently, I was somewhat dismayed at the degree to which the digital side of the gun debate was so completely owned by the pro-gun crowd. Not that they don’t deserve their fair share of the online environment, and not that they haven’t worked tirelessly to bring this about. But I’m interested in is a fair and honest fight between the two sides, and it won’t happen until both sides show up.

I was never particularly impressed by the content of the NRA video channel; the messaging tends to be didactic, wordy, sometimes outright stupid and basically boring as hell. But video characters like Billy Johnson, Colion Noir, Chris Cheng and Natalie Foster have carved out followings for themselves on the NRA website, along with YouTube, which means that a basic, pro-gun argument is viewed by hundreds, if not thousands of people every day. And while we usually think of arguments for more gun safety as belonging to the folks who try to promote more regulation of guns, the fact is that some of the best videos that show people how to use guns in a safe way are produced by the gun industry itself.

supvn The last several weeks, however, have seen this state of affairs beginning to change. Last week the Brady Campaign released a video on gun laws and gun violence, which they posted on a site that’s a spoof on the TripAdvisor website, which set a new standard for gun videos produced by either side. I talked about this video in Huffington and said that it was not only clever and theatrically well done, but also directly challenged a basic NRA argument that we will all be safer if everyone has a gun. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the evidence on the risks versus the benefits of an armed citizenry can be used to definitively sway the argument either way. What I am saying is that this video at least presents the argument about gun risk in persuasive and artistic terms.

The gun-sense folks have now released another video which is generating web-based commotion because of its content, artistry and tone, but this time the commotion is coming more from the other side in ways which indicate that the video’s argument is really hitting home. I am referring to a video released by States United to Prevent Gun Violence which shows a New York City gun shop that only sells guns which were used in gun violence, including the Bushmaster AR taken off the body of Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook and the pistol that the two-year old son of Veronica Rutledge used to kill his mom. The guns are fakes, the store doesn’t really exist and I’m not sure that the ‘customers’ who walked in and then exhibited varying degrees of shock and concern after being told the history of those guns were real customers at all. But no matter, the video is powerful, artistic and drives the message, pace the NRA, that owning a gun is a risk.

The video has been attacked by the usual pro-gun suspects like Bretbart and Daily Caller, but the most interesting response to the video from the pro-gun side was a demand made to the New York State Attorney General by the state’s NRA-affiliate Pistol and Rifle Association to investigate the video’s sponsor for violations of the state gun-control statute which, of course, this same association did everything it could to try and prevent from becoming law. If Eric Schneiderman has nothing better to do than chase after States United because they stuck a bunch of unlocked toy guns on a wall, then Andy should fire him immediately and appoint a new AG. Andy has better things to do.

The reaction to this video by the gun guys in New York tells me that the digital playing field on gun violence is beginning to level out. Now if the gun-sense folks could only find a stellar personality a la Clint Eastwood, to drive their video messages home…

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A New Video From Brady And The NRA Better Watch Out.

March 12, 2024

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I just watched one of the best YouTube videos on guns that I have ever seen. It is posted by the Brady Campaign and you can view it directly on YouTube or pull it down from the new Brady website called crimadvisor.com. The website, like the video, is a tongue-in-cheek riff on a campaign the Brady folks have been running for years which correlates rates of gun violence with state gun laws, the idea being that states with stricter gun controls experience less gun violence. Brady’s new effort to sell this idea is a website that spoofs TripAdvisor and a remarkably original video that sets a new standard for the gun debate on both sides.

The bizarre notion that we protect ourselves with laws is a direct challenge to the NRA mantra which says that the best way to protect ourselves is with guns. If it were up to the NRA, we’d go back and undo the GCA68, get rid of background checks entirely and let all those ‘law-abiding’ folks out there walk around with their unlicensed guns and protect the rest of us from the criminals and the thugs. The NRA promotes this armed citizen nonsense through its video channel that features a group of very serious-minded folks didactically delivering one boring commentary after another on the hows and whys of carrying guns.

brady I have never been comfortable at the extent to which the pro-gun community uses video to promote its agenda if only because so much of the content used to create their digital messaging simply isn’t true. For example, last year one of the NRA commentators, Billy Johnson, criticized the General Social Survey which showed that gun ownership had declined from 50% of all households to just 34% over the previous twenty years, citing a Gallup Poll which stated that more than 40% of all American households actually contained guns. The only problem is that what Johnson didn’t say was that while Gallup had a higher number for gun-owning households, its survey had also shown a decline in gun ownership over the same period of time. By omitting this critical information, Johnson was able to pretend that the GSS finding about declining gun ownership wasn’t true. What was really true was the way in which Johnson distorted the evidence to support his own point of view.

But the whole point of video is that it’s not the facts per se that gets your message across to the audience, but the personality, stagecraft and overall artistry of what viewers are watching which drives the message home. And here is where, when it comes to the gun world, the new Brady video has absolutely no peer. Close my eyes for a second and I thought I was listening to Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis in Natural Born Killers, the 1994 Oliver Stone - Quentin Tarantino movie where two psychopaths go roaming around the Southwest attacking everyone and everything in sight with their guns.

But while the on-screen antics of the Brady gun-toting wannabes create an element of satire and cleverness that’s just plain fun, it’s not that difficult to slip behind the sarcastic message of this production and perceive the basic argument of the Brady campaign that localities with weak gun regulations make us less, not more safe from crimes with guns. If you need some hard data to convince you further about where Brady stands, the video moves easily and seamlessly to the website where you can examine the gun-law environment in all 50 states.

I hope that Brady’s video goes viral and that this will be the first of a series of productions in which our two as-yet unnamed characters hold forth on a variety of relevant issues related to guns. The real challenge in social media is not reaching the folks who are already committed to what you believe; it’s reaching the folks who can become committed because they like the way you say it, and this video says it better than it’s ever been said.

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Gun Trafficking in America - cover

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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The Virus Is Spreading And I’m Not Talking About Ebola

October 16, 2024

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Last month the Missouri legislature passed a new gun law that was essentially a rewrite of a bill vetoed by Governor Jay Nixon. Missouri has been in the forefront of easing restrictions on gun ownership and this law continues that trend. In 2007 a decades-old law that required state residents to apply for police permits to purchase handguns was overturned, and the result was an immediate spike in gun homicides. The new law drops the minimum age for concealed-carry from 21 to 19, allows teachers to bring concealed weapons into schools, and prohibits towns, counties or other local jurisdictions from promulgating gun laws that conflict in any way with state statutes.

According to the law’s sponsor, Republican Senator Will Kraus, the law was designed to protect the rights of gun owners who had “earned” concealed-carry privileges by dint of voting or military service. Could this guy have a statement that dumb on the floor of the State Senate? Obviously he did, and he went on to say that a concealed-carry license also gives state residents the right to carry a weapon openly, again because they had “earned’ this right by dint of registering to vote.

docs versus glocks If the Missouri State Legislature wants to make it easier for state residents to pretend they can keep everyone safe by walking around with a gun, I really don’t care. Despite the continued mouthings of John Lott and other NRA sycophants, there is simply no credible evidence which proves that legal gun ownership reduces crime. The good news about concealed-carry is that most people who have a CCW permit actually don’t bother to walk around with a gun, and while CCW on the one hand doesn’t lead to less crime, it also doesn’t seem to spark any great increase in crime on the other.

But what I am concerned about is another part of the law which makes Missouri the second state to gag physicians who try to ask patients about their ownership of guns. Here’s what the law says: “No health care professional shall be required by law to inquire whether a patient owns or has access to a firearm.” It then goes on to prohibit physicians from noting gun ownership in a patient records or disclosing the identity of a gun owner to “any government entity” unless the physician is ordered to disclose such information via court order, blah, blah, blah. The final clause of this section of the law contains the usual bromide about how gun ownership can be discussed if, in the physician’s professional judgement, the patient’s access to a gun might be of medical concern. But make no mistake about it: Missouri, like Florida, has now instituted a gag order against physicians talking to patients about guns.

What really concerns me about this attack on physicians is not the fact that it has taken place. Frankly, once those two idiots on the 11th Federal Circuit upheld the Florida law, I assumed that it would be replicated in state after state. The bigger problem is that I learned about Missouri closing down physician inquiry from reading the text of the Missouri law itself. When the Florida law was first passed, the Brady Campaign, the American Academy of Pediatrics and a host of other medical groups not only went immediately to court, but kept up a steady drumbeat about the issue and even now are asking that the 11th Circuit’s bizarre decision be overturned. In the case of Missouri, nobody seems to have noticed that the gag-MD virus has spread.

The real reason that the gunnies want to push physicians out of the discussion about gun violence is not because physicians are opposed to guns. It’s because the NRA and its allies want to disconnect gun ownership from violence to make their products more acceptable, more enjoyable, more normal for every dad and mom. After all, we agree that violence is abnormal but guns don’t pose any threat at all. Isn’t that right, doc?

 

Where Should Americans Learn To Shoot? In School Of Course.

July 25, 2024

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Last week the National Education Association posted a video by Billy Johnson, who does “news commentary” for the NRA. Despite the disclaimer that the video does not represent the “opinions of other organizations,” the content is the usual NRA-admixture of half-truths, sophomoric clichés and outright lies. THE NEA gave it front-page coverage because it promotes the idea of universal gun education as part of the normal school curriculum, kind of like driver’s ed and just as necessary as reading, writing and math.

What’s the justification for this nonsense? According to Johnson, we should be teaching shooting in schools because Americans “need” guns and guns are “good.” This polite rant reflects an emerging NRA strategy is to reach beyond the organization’s core membership with a broad-based message to drive home the idea of guns as just another, regular consumer product that everyone should own. After all, once we get past purchasing the absolute necessities each week, don’t our decisions about what else to buy usually reflect only the fact that it’s something we really want? What’s it going to be this week? New shoes? New clothes? A new gun? Let’s go shopping.

Billy Johnson

Billy Johnson

The NRA messaging is an effort to “normalize” gun ownership, but also reflects their awareness of how Americans increasingly educate themselves, communicate with each other, and thus make decisions about what to buy, own, and otherwise pony up the consumer bucks. Not only is the whole society moving towards digital and particularly video channels, but the Millennials, the only generation who have yet to decide whether or not they want to own guns, are twice as likely to use Facebook and other social media outlets to make contact and communicate with others.

A bit of recognition of this problem was recently voiced on Huffington Post by Dan Gross, President of the Brady Campaign, who talked about the importance of messaging gun safety by “taking the emotion out of a debate that has gotten all tangled up in the second amendment.” He cites as a successful effort the joint Brady-American Academy of Pediatrics ASK program that encourages parents to ask if there are unsafe guns in homes where their children visit. I’m not taking anything away from either organization, but this approach completely misunderstands the NRA whose cavalcade of video commentators not only talk the talk directly to potential gun owners, but also – and here’s the key element – talk specifically about guns.

Gun control advocates feel comfortable talking about things like safety, background checks, mental health, concealed-carry and the like. But to the average gun owner or the wannabe gun owner, that’s just so much noise. The real question the gun control crowd should be asking is simply this: Do you really want to walk around with something which, in an instant, can end a life or change your life in an unalterably terrible way? But somehow the advocates for more gun control always seem to gloss over the only thing that really makes a difference, and that one thing is the gun. Meanwhile, the NRA forges ahead on the video playing-field selling the idea that guns are natural and good. On this issue, the most important issue, the other side doesn’t even field a second-string team.

We have grown accustomed to believing that the size of the gun-owning population is decreasing as the public surveys continue to show a decline in the percentage of households which claim to have guns. There is also plenty of internet chatter about how the NRA membership claims are vastly over-stated. Even if this is all true, and I’m not sure it is, the NRA and the gun lobby in general aren’t rolling over and playing dead. They are out there with their videos, their Facebook pages, their Tweets and the other channels that comprise a new media environment which they completely own. Do you think the other side can catch up?

Surprise! A Study Reveals That Unlocked Guns Are A Health Risk.

July 17, 2024

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Earlier this month The New York Times ran an editorial about a recent study on gun violence and children published by Everytown, aka Moms, aka Bloomberg, et.al. Like a similar study published this year on mass shootings, the major sources were media reports about unintentional gun deaths of children which, according to this report, is substantially higher than the numbers furnished by the CDC.

The issuance of the report, according to a letter to the Times, coincided with the annual ASK day, which is a collaboration between Brady and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to encourage safe gun storage in homes with young children. The ASK campaign has been around for more than ten years and, according to its website has “inspired more than 19 million households” to keep guns away from where children play. Unfortunately, if the numbers of unintentional child deaths from shootings can be believed, the ASK campaign has a long way to go.

everytown logo I don’t doubt Brady’s claim about reaching 19 million households, although I’m not sure how many of these households either contain guns or keep them around unlocked. My impression is that very few gun owners are willing to listen to what Brady or Bloomberg has to say, just as there can’t be more than a handful of non-gun owners who are members of the NRA. When all is said and done, this is the real problem in the debate about guns, namely, that the flagship advocacy organizations speak only to their like-minded constituencies, there’s no real communication between adherents on the two sides.

According to the Newtown report, there are 21 states that have no child access prevention (CAP) laws at all. What this means is that if a kid (or an adult, for that matter) picks up a gun and bangs away, the gun’s owner doesn’t face charges even if someone is injured or killed. Many of these states are out West, where gun controls have been traditionally lax, but while these states don’t suffer much in the way of unintentional shootings, they do experience higher-than-average gun suicide rates, which might also be mitigated if guns had to be locked up. On the other hand, Eastern states like Michigan, Ohio and South Carolina all had multiple juvenile deaths from gun accidents, and none of these three states have any CAP laws that might have helped prevent access to guns.

I’ll leave it to Brady to figure out how to mobilize even a portion of those 19 million ASK households to help drive their agenda forward; my primary concern is to look at the role that pediatricians should play in diminishing the health risks of unlocked guns. Jim Perrin, a co-signer of the New York Times letter and President of the AAP, believes that unlocked guns present the same kind of health risk to children as lead or unattended backyard pools. And he makes the point that just telling children about the risk of guns isn’t enough; kids are naturally curious and in this case curiosity could do a lot more than kill the cat. After all, many pediatricians ask parents whether they lock children into a car seat before going for a ride. How much longer does it take to add the word ‘gun’ to a question about locks?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to add a minute’s extra work or responsibility to everything that medical professionals are now required to do in the brief time they spend with patients each day. But the physician’s task is to lessen risk, and no matter what nonsense Rand Paul and the NRA promote about how doctors are a threat to the 2nd Amendment, anyone who believes that an unlocked gun in a home with children isn’t a health risk is presenting a degree of stupidity that no amount of medical care will ever cure.

Do We Need More Research On Gun Violence?

October 16, 2024

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coverFollowing Sandy Hook, the Obama Administration took upon itself to organize discussions that ultimately led to the publication of a new gun research agenda. Basically this report could be summed up as ‘new wine in old bottles,’ because it called for studies of the same issues that had been on the CDC agenda before gun research was closed down. I have analyzed this report in my own book and it’s been subject to the usual negative commentary by the minions of the NRA. And since no funding for any of the suggested research areas has been voted through the Congress, the report remains exactly that: another dead report.

 

But the inactivity of the CDC in this area doesn’t mean that gun violence research isn’t going on. To the contrary, it continues to be conducted by a number of different organizations and individual researchers, to the point that there’s very little about the issue of gun violence that isn’t understood. Most of the research has come out of the major advocacy organizations like the Violence Policy Center and the Brady Campaign. Mike Bloomberg has endowed a research program at Johns Hopkins that publishes significant work, as does David Hemenway’s Injury Control Research Center at Harvard’s School of Public Health.

 

This is hardly a comprehensive list of organizations or individuals who are conducting meaningful gun violence research. And I apologize to the many serious researchers for whom space limitations don’t allow me cite their works. But I did want to spend a few sentences on a particularly significant research effort being carried out for the past two decades by an emergency room physician in California, Garen Wintemute, because here we have a remarkable example of theory linked to practice by someone who deals with the net results of gun violence every day that he shows up at work.

 

Wintemute’s Violence Prevention Research Program, housed at UC/Davis, has conducted research on a wide variety of issues related to gun violence, but what makes his work so compelling is that it combines extensive analysis of data with hands-on contacts between himself and the subjects of his research: gun owners, gun-show exhibitors, gun dealers, gun manufacturers. He is the only medical or public health specialist I know who has actually verified his data by visiting gun shops, walking through and observing gun shows, walking onto gun factory floors and, it should be added, he’s been a gun owner himself.

 

Recently Wintemute and several colleagues published an article calling for physicians to become more visible advocates in the gun violence debate. I reviewed this article in a post that I published on September 26. At that time I was impressed by the fact that an article calling for physicians to get more involved in gun issues was published at all. But what really stands out is the fact that physicians, despite what the NRA says, can and should play a role in decisions about guns because doctors are experts in dealing with fears about disease and death, and many people decide to own a gun because they have fears about crime.

 

This is the kind of original thinking that comes from analysis that is grounded both in data and real life. And physicians should realize that no amount of research will convince the NRA or its supporters that medical professionals should and must play an important role in defining America’s relationship to guns. When the trigger of a gun is pulled and someone’s in the way, it’s physicians like Garen Wintemute who have to deal with the results. That’s enough of a reason to listen to what he has to say.

 

 

 

Related articles

 

  • NRA Tried To Stifle Study Showing Gun Retailers Support Background Checks (thinkprogress.org)

 

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