Do We Really Know How To Talk About Gun Violence When People Are Afraid?

November 22, 2024

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I teach the gun safety course in my state that is required for anyone who wants a license to buy a gun. The license also allows most gun owners to walk around with a concealed handgun, even though the state doesn’t actually mandate live fire as a requirement prior to buying a gun. Which shouldn’t surprise, since there isn’t a single state whose training/proficiency criteria for CCW would meet what most trainers like myself would consider even minimal exposure to shooting, but that’s beside the point.

I usually teach 50-60 people each month. But in the one week since the Paris attacks, almost that many people have signed up for the class. The same thing happened after Sandy Hook, but I put that down to the fact that the massacre in Newtown provoked a clamor for tougher gun laws, which always creates a counter-response, i.e., more interest in guns. But the ISIS attack was somewhat different, because this time the worst of our political fraternity, like Donald Trump, used the event to cynically and stupidly call out for more citizens to walk around with guns.

But let’s be honest about Trump and his publicity-mongering friends. His calls for personal, armed resistance to jihadist threats wouldn’t garner the kind of support that he’s getting if there weren’t lots of folks out there who truly believe that their lives are made safer if they have access to a gun. Even though Trump tailors his message to what the British used to refer to as “the mob,” a street-level terrorist attack in Paris can easily be conjured up to be like a street-level attack in New York. And make no mistake about it, people are scared.

And this has always been one of the elephants in the living room for the GVP community, if only because their calls for ‘sensible’ gun regulations run up against a continuous and long-time effort by the gun industry to promote the ownership of guns based on fear. It used to be fear of street crime, or what Dana Loesch lovingly refers to as ‘thugs.’ But now the fear is taking on a new dimension because while violent crime has always tended to be a factor of inner-city, ghetto life, violent terrorist attacks are much more targeted at the middle class: a commuter train blows up in Madrid, a luxury hotel is shot apart in Mumbai, in Paris it’s a fancy club.

Advocates for GVP have attempted to counter this linkage between fear, personal safety and gun ownership by producing solid research which shows that CCW not only doesn’t protect the average person from violence of any kind, but actually increases the risk of physical injury because of access to a gun. The problem with this approach is not that the evidence about gun-risk can’t be found, it’s that evidence of any kind just doesn’t work very well when it is used in an argument created and sustained by emotions, particularly the emotion of fear. I have a very close friend who has 4 weeks of a Florida time-share every January but he gives up an entire week by driving rather than going down and back on a plane. He has a fear of flying and no matter how many times I tell him that the odds of dying in a plane crash are 1/1000th the odds of smashing up his car, he’s still getting behind the wheel.

What makes it so difficult for us to protect ourselves from terrorism is its irrationality; like the President says, they’re not afraid to die. Which is the same reason why trying to use a fact-based argument against self-protection with a gun isn’t necessarily a viable strategy in a time of generalized fear. The GVP community needs to develop solid options for mitigating fear that reflect not just data-based research, but respond to honest emotions provoked by events which we cannot control. If we are indeed in a War Against Terror, that’s the challenge that lies ahead.

Dana Loesch Opens Her Mouth About Guns And Gets It Wrong Again.

November 19, 2024

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When the NRA has to join forces with the paranoid fantasists who shoot their mouths off on The Blaze, you know that a decision has been made by the folks in Fairfax to abandon even a shred of reality-based discussion in order to hold onto their ever-dwindling base. And like it or not, the number of Americans who own guns keeps dropping, which means that in order to sell more guns, a way has to be found to convince current gun owners to buy more, and more, and more. And the game plan that has always worked in this regard is to sell the idea that Armageddon in the form of gun confiscation is right around the corner or lurking down the block.

The most successful use of this strategy occurred over the last seven years due to the fact that our President made no bones about the fact that he was, generally speaking, anti-gun. So it was easy for the gun industry to remind its supporters that Obama was the tenant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a conclusion that spoke for itself. Of course the problem now is that he can’t run again; but until January 20, 2025 we can remind the gun folks that he’s still capable of doing terrible things.

And who better to push the most conspiratorial argument from this point of view than Dana Loesch, who got going as a right-wing noisemaker promoting her own, nutty view of the world on The Blaze, but has now been hired by the NRA. And her inaugural video, which floated onto YouTube yesterday, is a combination of conspiracy, fear-mongering and downright falsehoods that could put even the most ardent conspiracy theorists (I’m thinking of Jade Helm, for example) to shame.

The only statement in Dana’s entire spiel that even remotely aligns with the truth is when she says early on that Obama is considering using Executive Orders to expand government regulation over guns. In fact, the Kenyan has made it clear that he is looking at options to close some loopholes which, under current gun laws, let individuals transfer large quantities of guns without undergoing NICS-background checks. And what this would amount to is making a clear distinction between the gun owner who buys, sells or transfers guns from time to time because he’s a hobbyist and he just enjoys fooling around with guns, as opposed to the guy who brings 50 ‘personally-owned’ handguns into a gun show, sells these guns and then restocks his inventory to sell more guns for profit at the next show. I’m not saying that a gun transferred without a NICS-background check is necessarily going to wind up in the ‘wrong hands.’ But you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that someone who can’t pass a background check today still won’tencounter any great difficulty if he wants to get his hands on a gun.

So here’s how Dana puts it: “You see, the President could use his pen to require that even the simplest transfer of a firearm between family members, like if my husband handed a rifle to his oldest son, be treated in accordance with FFL requirements.” She then goes on to paint a frightening picture of the ATF coming into the home of every gun owner, kind of a throwback to Wayne-o’s calling the ATF ‘jack-booted thugs,’ in a fundraising letter sent to the membership in 1995.

This extraordinary mangling of gun law, you should know, comes out of the mouth of someone who claims to have written a book about guns and Constitutional law. But the fact is that the entire FFL system, as defined by GCA68, has nothing to do with personal transfers at all. Dana obviously doesn’t know the difference between personal transfers on the one hand and business transactions on the other. But why should she care? Do you honestly believe that anyone who takes her rubbish seriously is interested in an evidence-based discussion about guns?

When It Comes To Gun Violence,Dana Loesch And John Lott Can’t Get It Straight.

October 27, 2024

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Every time I see Dana Loesch and John Lott on the same screen I wonder who is really who. One looks like she had a sex-change operation, the other masqueraded on the internet as a female, altogether an interesting pair. And it really gets interesting when they open their mouths because the misstatements aren’t just a little bit here and there; it’s almost like they really want you to think that they don’t know anything at all. Dana refers to information on a website about concealed-carry scofflaws in Texas and gets it completely wrong, Lott disparages the Violence Policy Center’s report on concealed-carry and completely distorts what the report actually says.

loesch But the dumbest part of their conversation is an attempt to smear Shannon Watts by claiming that the reports issued by Everytown on mass shootings in gun-free zones are incorrect. So I went to Lott’s website and read his critique of the Everytown research, including his analysis of every shooting compiled by Everytown to back up their position that most mass shootings occur in places where guns are allowed.

This is where I begin to suspect that creatures like Lott don’t understand what’s in their own minds. If Dana Loesch wants to parrot the prevailing pro-gun nonsense I’m not surprised nor concerned; she’s nothing but a two-bit entertainer filling up some air-space for The Blaze. But when John Lott, who told Sean Hannity that he was a “professor” for “most of his life” (even though he has never held professorial rank at any educational institution of any kind) responds to the solid Everytown research by consciously saying things that simply aren’t true, we’ve reached the point of no return in attempting to engage the pro-gun gang in any kind of serious give-and-take.

The Everytown report covered 133 mass shootings between 2009 and 2015, a mass shooting defined as a single incident in which at least four persons died. Interestingly, the overall profile which emerges from these incidents is not that different from what would be found if someone analyzed 133 gun homicides without regard to whether they resulted in multiple victims or not. In the mass shootings, the majority took place in homes and were precipitated by a domestic dispute. The median age of the shooters was 34 and one-third should not have been able to legally acquire a gun. Finally, less than 15% of these shootings took place in ‘gun-free’ zones.

It figures that a report finding little connection between mass shootings and ‘gun-free’ zones would provoke a rebuttal from John Lott. The report, he says “muddies the discussion on mass public shootings by including shootings in private homes along with ones in public places, and the vast majority of the cases they include are in private homes.” He then goes on to make an even more absurd (or bizarre) criticism by claiming that any public place located in a city which doesn’t routinely issue concealed-carry licenses should also be considered a ‘gun-free’ zone. His comment about Boston in this regard is simply wrong and on this point Lott either doesn’t know what he’s talking about or he’s just stating a lie.

Let me break the news gently to John Lott and pro-gun lapdogs like Dana Loesch: anyone who has unquestioned access to a private residence is, to all intents and purposes, walking into a public space when he enters that home. The issue of ‘public’ versus ‘private’ is a red herring of immense proportions when we are talking about mass killings in which someone uses a gun. And by the way, have you ever heard of a murder in which someone killed four or more persons with a knife? I know of one.

There is no credible evidence whatsoever that ‘gun-free’ zones represent some kind of attraction to someone who wants to commit mayhem with a gun. There’s a load of credible evidence which links mass murders to the use of a gun. Lott and Loesch aren’t interested in evidence; they’re interested in filling up media space with their unique brand of hot air.

The NRA May Think It Owns The Gun Debate But The Other Side Is Waking Up.

October 12, 2024

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One of the things I’ve trained myself to do is a weekly check of the NRA-ILA website, because as don Corleone advised his son Michael, you always have to keep your enemies closer than your friends. And while I don’t consider myself and the NRA to be enemies necessarily, I do consider their continued attempts to push a very radical, pro-gun agenda to be shortsighted and ill-advised. When I joined the NRA in 1955, it was an organization devoted to training, gun history and outdoor life. It still devotes time, energy and resources to those activities, but the organization’s major thrust today is to promote the notion of armed citizens which I believe does nothing except increase risk.

open The real reason I’m against the NRA’s push for concealed-carry is that, believe it or not, I think CCW laws for the most part actually threaten rather than strengthen the 2nd-Amendment right to own a gun. I say that for the following reasons. First, the 2008 Heller decision specifically and explicitly limited private ownership to guns kept in the home, and I don’t care if all these so-called 2nd Amendment ‘absolutists’ want to yap about their God-given right to walk around with a gun, the law says otherwise, period, end of debate. Second, Heller also vested in government the right to regulate, and there has not been a single challenge to Heller that has denied the public authority from having the last word when it comes to how, why and when people can carry or use guns.

Finally and most important, a majority, in fact a large majority of Americans don’t own guns. That’s not true in Western states like Montana, the Dakotas or Idaho, which together have a total population 4.4 million, which is less than the body count for Brooklyn and Queens. The moment you move into populous states however, particularly on the two coasts where more than 100 million live, per capita gun ownership begins to drop down to one out of four or one out of five. And despite the whining of Mother Loesch about all those millions of Moms who own guns, that’s about as near to reality as how effectively she teaches her kids by keeping them at home.

Most Americans are in favor of gun ownership, as long as guns are kept out of the wrong hands. And the only way that will happen is to let the public authority create and enforce laws that restrict gun ownership to folks who play by the rules; and I’m not talking about the rules that govern everyday conduct, I’m talking about the rules that regulate the ownership of guns. Which is why it’s absurd that the NRA would be campaigning against background checks while, at the same time saying that every law-abiding citizen should own and carry a gun. It’s a contradictory message and, unless you’re a diehard gun owner, it makes no sense.

This is why I found it interesting that the NRA-ILA website carried a story this week criticizing a recent report which once again found that upwards of 40% of all gun transfers occur without a background check – a loophole that has been mentioned by just about everyone who wants to see an end to violence caused by guns. The evidence for this claim is an old survey conducted in 1994 which, according to the NRA, cannot be used to measure “anything about the American people with only 251 respondents in a survey.” This is the same NRA that has been telling us that armed citizens prevent “millions” of crimes from being committed every year. Where does this evidence comes from? Another 1994 survey whose respondents numbered 221!

The NRA will never have a problem convincing gun owners that what it says about guns is sacred and true. But the recent shootings in Virginia and Oregon may have turned the tide and 200 million non-gun owners may be asking themselves what they can do.

Dre Buys A Gun And We Learn A Lesson About Gun Violence.

October 1, 2024

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Now that Anthony Anderson has replaced Bill Cosby as the African-American whose family life proves that most families face the same, universal problems regardless of race, the show’s writers have to come up with situations reflecting issues that come up when everyone’s sitting around the dinner table, or running off to school in the morning, or getting ready for bed. That being the case, what better issue to inject onto the screen in Black-ish’s second episode this season than the issue of guns?

Anthony Anderson

And before I go any further, I just want to remind my readers that the gun industry has been trying like all get out to convince African-Americans to own guns because the typical gun owner, an older White man like me, owns more guns than he knows what to do with them anyway, so demographics like minorities, women and new immigrants hopefully represent new consumer targets who need to be convinced to buy guns. It hasn’t worked in the African-American community, by the way, no matter how many times Colion Noir prances around on the NRA video screen. Nor have women been flocking into gun shops because a pathetic, Sarah Palin wannabe named Dana Loesch stands there in a tough leather outfit delivering a vapid monologue on how her gun protects her family from thugs.

The “Rock, Paper, Scissors, Gun” episode of Black-ish on the other hand, is both funny and profound, the former because the script simply doesn’t miss a trick when it comes to spoofing just about every sacred cow we have; the latter because interspersed with terrifically comic lines are serious statements about guns and gun violence that honestly capture both sides of the gun debate. The argument about guns, after all, gets down to whether the benefit derived from using a gun for self-defense outweighs the risk of keeping an altogether lethal consumer product around the home. And if you listen closely to the dialogue, you’ll realize that the folks who created this script for Black-ish have taken the trouble to read and understand both the obvious and the subtle issues that inform the gun debate.

Example: Dre wants a gun in the house, his wife Bow does not. In fact, men are much more likely to be gun owners than women by a margin of eight or nine to one. Example: Miles, the six-year old, gets very excited over the prospect of a gun, his older brother Andre, who spends all his time on the computer, couldn’t care less. In fact, young children are the most vulnerable to gun accidents because they are naturally curious, have no sense of risk and everything to them is a toy.

Finally Bow gives in and Dre goes out to buy a gun. There’s a remarkably funny moment inside a gun shop involving an older Asian-American woman who has just bought a shotgun, but I’ll leave its description unsaid. So now the gun is in the house and one night it sounds like the veritable bad guy has broken in so everyone crowds into Dre’s bedroom because he’ll protect them with the gun. Except that the door opens and in stumbles Dre’s father played perfectly by Laurence Fishburne who doesn’t get shot only because Dre can’t figure out how to actually use the gun.

Of course the show has already come in for the usual stupid and snarky comments from the pro-gun gang, but there’s no question that Black-ish captures the truth about the risks embodied in owning a personal-defense gun. And the final moments invoke a very profound insight when Dre confesses to his father that the reason he wants to own a gun is because he felt scared as a young boy and wished he had a real gun back then. The GVP community often finds pro-gun fervor to be inexplicable and difficult, if not impossible, to understand in logical terms. Is there a chance that Dre’s admission of childhood fears provides an important clue?

Dana Loesch Gets A Taste Of Her Own Medicine And It Couldn’t Happen To A More Deserving Gal.

September 29, 2024

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Now that Dana Loesch has discovered a new way to get people to listen to her stupid and senseless I’m a pistol-packin’ Mom video, we can all sit back and wait for her next attempt to climb out from underneath her rock and pretend that she knows anything about guns. I’m referring to the childish effort by a video designer to mock Dana’s even more childish defense of gun violence by creating what is obviously a satire of her message which ends with an explosion, a spatter of blood and, if you have any kind of imagination, it looks and sounds like Dana shot herself with a Glock.

Unfortunately, the video has been removed both from the Twitter page of its designer, as well as from a story that obligingly appeared in The Blaze. But this hasn’t stopped Dana from lining up her right-wing media cronies like Cam Edwards, as well as her legion of adoring fans to come to her defense in her hour of need. The problem is that Dana’s original video about having a gun because she needs to protect her family uses the same, old, senseless argument that the NRA has been putting out there for thirty years, namely, that we are all the targets of violent criminals both within our homes and out in the street, and the only way to defend ourselves in an increasingly violent world is to get our hands on a gun.

loeschBut this time the attack didn’t come from some imaginary (I’m going to use one of Dana’s favorite words) thug bursting through the door; it was in the form of a video that played harmlessly on the web. Too bad for Dana that she can’t defend herself from words or pictures by brandishing her gun. But she can remind all her fans that the only violence they need to fear is the artistic violence perpetrated by her enemies who want to get rid of the guns. She tweeted that the video was a “threat” on her life and then in a later tweet accused the same, liberal crowd that was behind the video of being the real promoters of violence because, after all, they will kill “babies and conservatives” if and when they get the chance.

I guess if you accuse someone of murder in print it’s okay, it’s just when a violent event is captured on video that someone’s crossed the line. But Dana’s ready for all possibilities because remember, she’s got a gun. And just in case the video really does constitute a threat to her life, she’s already contacted the FBI. Of course she also made sure that an obliging gun company, in this case Remington, offered to help her protect herself by sending her a new gun. The choreography of Dana’s response to this video is all too neat, all too perfect; I’m wondering - did she produce the video herself?
I want to say two things about Dana Loesch. First, she’s a real bore, and I don’t mean stupid and boring, which she is. What I really mean is that she debases every discussion she joins. Dana reduces everything to the lowest common intellectual denominator, she shamelessly panders to anger and fear. I have no issue with pro-gun folks who state their views with attention to real facts and respect for the truth. I didn’t notice cry-baby Dana mouthing any concern when a meme appeared in which an idiot actually did threaten Shannon Watts by putting an axe through her head.

Second, because I’m polite I won’t call her a liar but what she says is simply not true. The number of women who are shot in domestic disputes with guns kept around the home is twenty times higher than the number of women who use a gun to protect themselves from harm. When Dana stands there primping in her leather outfit (no doubt wearing it while she home-schools her kids) and tells women that a gun will make them safe, she’s promoting real danger, not responding to a make-believe event.

 

Did You Know That Gun Owners Are America’s Most Persecuted Minority? Just Ask Dana Loesch.

September 16, 2024

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If I were an African-American or a member of some other racial or ethnic minority, it would really be comforting to know that the cause of racial equality is being championed by a gun-toting woman named Dana Loesch. Not only does Dana understand gender issues, but she claims to be a gun owner, which by definition means she knows all about prejudice and being a member of the most persecuted minority group of all. But thanks to the NRA and its video series, Freedom’s Safest Place, Dana’s now able to defend my minority rights and the rights of all law-abiding Americans who know they’ll be safer if they use and carry a gun.

When you’re a member of a persecuted minority like Dana, it’s easy for you to identify the people who persecute you the most. And Dana’s been on a rant lately concerning the Numero Uno persecutor, the arrogant, elitist, New Yorker Michael Bloomberg, who keeps getting an assist from another no good, anti-gunner named Shannon Watts. Dana began issuing warnings about Bloomberg’s racism earlier this year when she linked to an audio of remarks made by Mayor Mike at an Aspen conference at which he allegedly stated that “ninety-five percent” of all murders were committed by “minorities” which, according to Dana, means African-American males. And since, according to Dana, only about half of all murders in America are committed by African-Americans, here’s proof-positive that Bloomberg’s just another racist White guy trying to disarm all the Blacks.

bloomberg Now in fact, if you actually listen to the Bloomberg tape, what he’s referring to is New York City where violent crime happens to be an uncontested feature of minority life, but the word ‘minority’ in New York City doesn’t refer only to Blacks, it means all the residents of economically impacted inner-city ghettos like Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn, Jamaica in Queens, Upper Harlem in Manhattan, Port Richmond in Staten Island and most of the South Bronx. Nobody living in a million-dollar co-op on Manhattan’s trendy Upper West Side needs to be worried about getting mugged, ditto residents in Brooklyn Heights or Forest Hills. And this is what Bloomberg meant in correctly using the term ‘minority’ when he answered a question at Aspen, and this is what Dana Loesch has consciously misrepresented in attacking both Mayor Mike and Shannon Watts in her recent tweets.

Believe it or not, I don’t really blame Dana Loesch for making up an argument about guns based on whole cloth. A girl has to earn a living, and while I’m sure we’ll soon see a line of Loesch leather garments for professional S&M dommes, Dana’s just stupidly parroting a line about guns and African-Americans that the NRA has been pushing for the last several years.

Back in the 1990s, the gun industry discovered that people like me who owned guns for hunting and sport were slowly dying off and not being replaced. So they invented a new reason to buy guns -protection from crime - which meant that gun owners were really protecting themselves from the you-know-who’s. And if you doubt that gun ownership for self-protection wasn’t part and parcel of a racist appeal, take a look at the television spots that Charlton Heston produced for the NRA.

The good news is that the strategy kept people buying guns. The bad news is that while gun sales continue to go up, the number of gun owners keeps going down. So the industry and its promoters have to find new markets wherever they can. Enter the likes of Dana Loesch with messages crafted for both minorities and moms, neither group, incidentally, showing much inclination to run into gun shops and pull bangers off the shelves.

Dana, let me break the news gently to you and your like-minded friends. You’re talking to yourselves and nobody who knows or cares anything about history, facts, or the reality of inner-city life is going to take you seriously. And gun violence is a serious issue, which is why you have nothing to contribute at all.

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