What Happens When People Walk Around With Guns? People Get killed.

March 9, 2024

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This week the Colorado legislature showed itself to still have enough members with brains to beat back the annual brain-dead attempt to ‘restore’ gun ‘rights’ to the good citizens of the Centennial State. The Colorado GVP community shot them all down. You may recall that in 2014 Colorado expanded background checks to cover private transactions, and while the pro-gun strategy this year did not include an attempt to repeal the background check law, it did include Gun Nation’s favorite gun-rights ploy; i.e., permitless concealed-carry, including on school grounds.

ccwSpeaking of the joys and virtues of concealed carry, our friends at the Violence Policy Center have just updated their website which contains data on gun fatalities committed by CCW-holders, with the number now standing at 863 non-defensive deaths since 2007. Since there is no official count for how many of the 31,000+ gun deaths each year occur thanks to someone using a gun that was being legally carried around for self-defense, we have to assume that the VPC number is far below the real number, but that’s not the point.

The point is that I have been listening to this crap about the millions of times each year that legal CCW-holders use their guns to prevent crimes, and if this is really true, then what’s the difference if a few hundred or even a few thousand people kill themselves or kill someone else with their concealed-carry guns? One of the brain-dead legislators in Colorado explained why state residents should be able to bring permitless concealed-carry guns into schools in the following way: “I, for one, am tired of sending my daughters to school on blind faith that they will return home from a place where people are prevented by state law from equipping themselves to protect my daughters.” Okay, so this friggin’ dope can go lay brick.

But to give the all dopes their due, I decided to look into the situation a little further by trying to figure out whether, in fact, all these people walking round with a concealed gun are making our communities more safe. And what better place to examine the situation than in Florida because, after all, the whole concealed-carry movement first erupted in the Gunshine State. And according to the Florida Department of Agriculture, which issues CCW, there are now 1.5 million active concealed licenses, so Florida must be a pretty safe place, right?

Wrong. Let me give you a few numbers. In 2011, the metropolitan area with the highest violent crime rate in the entire United States wasn’t Chicago, wasn’t Philadelphia, it was Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Pompano Beach. In 2014, that wonderful family vacation spot known as Orlando had a higher violent crime rate than Chicago or New York. I could go on like this but the truth is that the massive armed citizenry in Florida hasn’t been worth a damn when it comes to keeping the good citizens of that state free from crime.

But let’s drill down a little further and look specifically at the issue of how CCW guns are actually used for or against the commission of crimes. According to the VPC, there have been at least 21 Floridians killed by CCW-holders since 2013, an average of 7 each year. On the other hand, justifiable homicides, have averaged roughly 23 per year in Florida since ‘Stand Your Ground’ was passed in 2005. But while gun homicides have increased since SYG, no other violent crime category showed any real change at all.

Now wait a minute. I thought the whole point of concealed-carry is to make communities safe. So how come in Florida of all places the number of people getting legally killed with guns keeps going up but the crime rate doesn’t go down? Here’s the bottom line and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand what it means. Know what happens when more people walk around with guns? More people get killed. Gee, that was hard to figure out.

A New Study Reveals How And When All Those Bad Guys Get Their Hands On Guns.

March 5, 2024

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You may believe that the reason the NRA is so powerful is because of all the money they spread around Congress to block any sensible gun reforms. But that’s actually putting the cart before the horse, because what really makes them effective is the fact that a majority of shootings are classified as crimes, and Gun Nation has been very successful convincing everyone that they need to be concerned about crime and not about guns.

conference-program-pic It’s a hard argument to refute when the numbers are on their side. In 2013, the last year for numbers in every gun violence category, there were 117,613 killed or wounded with guns. Of this total, just short of 80,000 were homicides or aggravated assaults, another 21,000 were suicides and the remainder, roughly 17,000, were accidents of whom more than 97% lived. The bottom line is that when we talk about gun violence, like it or not, we are talking about crime.

And the NRA never misses an opportunity to remind us that guns aren’t the problem, it’s the bad guys, the criminals who are the problem. And since everybody knows that criminals by definition don’t obey laws, why pass more gun laws, particularly when all you end up doing is making it more difficult for all those law-abiding gun owners to enjoy playing around with their guns?

Ever since Gun Nation discovered that hunting was on the wane, some new rationale had to be advanced to promote the ownership of guns. And what better use for a gun than to keep it around just in case one of those bad guys comes crashing through a window or the back door? And if you then produce studies which shows that law-abiding Americans use guns several million times each year to protect themselves from all those bad guys, how can you go wrong?

You can go wrong if what you are saying has little, if anything, to do with the truth. And in that regard the National Bureau of Economic Research has just published a study on teen-age criminality that should be required reading for everyone concerned about GVP. The NBER is an independent economic think-tank that, among other things, is mandated by Congress to tell us when recessions begin and when they end. NBER also looks at a wide variety of issues that affect American society, and one of the issues that obviously impacts our society is the issue of crime. This particular study examined the various factors which lead teen-age boys to form what the authors refer to as criminal ‘partnerships’ which result in the commission of crimes. These partnerships or networks appear to develop around age 14, and they result in much higher levels of criminal activity than what is committed by kids acting on their own.

Couple this information with studies on adolescent gun access and a very interesting picture begins to emerge. Alan Lizotte found that boys start carrying guns around age 14 and “the amount of serious violent crime the boys committed during periods of active gun carrying was more than five times the amount they committed when they did not carry guns.” And where do these two groups – gun carriers and crime partnerships - intersect? Not so much in the neighborhood, not so much in the street corner, but in school. The NBER found that of all the factors involving personal contact which then leads to crime, it is the degree to which these adolescent boys first connect with one another in the same classrooms to which they are assigned.

The NRA promotes gun safety education in schools so maybe we should take them at their word. But instead of telling kids how to behave safely with guns, how about the NRA saying that they shouldn’t own a gun at all? If school-age kids don’t start carrying around guns, they can’t turn into bad guys and without all those bad guys, the rest of us wouldn’t need guns. Simple, isn’t it?

 

A Must-Read Report On Guns And Domestic Violence.

February 18, 2024

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Two new GVP organizations, Prosecutors Against Gun Violence and The Consortium for Risk-Based Firearm Policy, have just produced a new report that deserves the widest possible distribution and discussion. Entitled Firearm Removal/Retrieval in Cases of Domestic Violence, the report not only highlights the degree to which gun access makes domestic violent so much more violent and deadly, but also presents case studies on removal/retrieval strategies that are currently employed in different states.

Leaving aside for a moment the report’s content, there is one other significant reason why this is such an important and valuable report. Because for the first time we have an approach to gun violence which brings together all the major GVP stakeholders: law enforcement, legal, prosecutorial, public health, non-profit, GVP advocacy – I hope I’m not leaving anyone out. It’s a very impressive list.

To quote the report: “Guns and domestic violence are a lethal combination.” The report cites the fact that there is a five-fold increase in deaths when either person (usually a man) in a domestic dispute has access to a gun. If the report had given all the scholarly citations which exist to support this statement, we could spend lots of time scrolling down to get to the rest of the text. NRA nonsense to the contrary (see below), what happens when a gun is part of an argument between domestic partners is an indisputable fact.

Guns can be taken away from persons engaged in domestic disputes either through a Court action or by law enforcement called to the scene of the dispute itself. The fact that 32 states do not have any statutes authorizing on-scene seizures of weapons is, to my mind, a remarkable failure of government to fulfill its ‘compelling interest’ to keep communities safe. Because no matter how strong or effective a Court-ordered removal/retrieval action happens to be, there will always be some gap in time between when the dispute occurs and when a gun has to be given up. The report notes that half the women killed by intimate partners had contact with the criminal justice system related to the dispute within one year prior to their deaths. But when the cops show up at the front door because someone calls them and says that there’s a big fight going on in the apartment down the hall, does this type of incident, which happens all the time, count as ‘contact’ with criminal justice? I have my doubts.

The part of the report that I find most disconcerting are the maps which show what types of removal strategies are sanctioned by state laws. Typical of state gun laws, it’s a hodge-podge of statutes, with a few states requiring gun removal after the issuance of an order, other states granting implicit removal authority, but many states making no mention of gun removals at all. In this third group, for example, we find Texas, Missouri, Louisiana and Georgia, which just happen to be four states whose overall gun violence rates far exceed the national average. Any chance there’s a connection?

The NRA will tell you there’s no connection at all. In fact, in their obsessive attempts to find new markets, Gun Nation has been trying to convince women, in particular, to defend themselves with guns. The latest screed in this respect comes from that idiotic loudmouth Dana Loesch, who has just put out another video claiming that gun control is the ‘real war against women’ because only a gun can equalize the physical differences between women and men.

I want to end with a slight editorial which in no way detracts from the value and importance of this report. I have always believed that the term ‘domestic violence’ is perhaps too narrow to really capture and understand what gun violence is all about. Perhaps 80% of all gun homicides and assaults involve persons who knew each other and most of the perpetrators had histories of violence before the attack occurred. Don’t we need to find some way to take the guns away from them?

 

 

How Many Guns In America? Maybe Not As Many As You Think.

December 14, 2024

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Now that The New York Times has decided to become a major player in the gun debate – they even have editorial writers attending gun shows – we better make sure that all our facts are straight and our arguments correct when it comes to explaining violence caused by guns. Now I’m not concerned with getting facts from my friends on the gun nut side because like all gun nuts, including myself, we just want to hold onto our guns. But it’s my friends in the GVP community dialoging with the newspaper that sets the gold standard for fact-checking who need to make sure they get it right. So over the next couple of weeks I’m going to look at some of the evidence the GVP folks bring to bear in discussing guns, and I’m starting today with the most basic question of all, namely, just how many guns do Americans really own?

We are told again and again that the size of the civilian arsenal is somewhere above 300 million and climbing fast. Since we don’t have anything close to universal (or even partial) gun registration, this number comes from a somewhat creative extrapolation combining guns that are manufactured and imported (both of which must be reported to the ATF), plus estimates of how many guns were floating around before the ATF started compiling and publishing their numbers in 1986. The base number that is used by researchers on both sides comes from a survey of gun owners conducted for the National Institute of Justice in 1994. This study concluded that the civilian arsenal stood at 192 million guns which, when one adds in the annual numbers from the ATF since that date, gets us up to the 300-plus million that is bandied around today.

Both the gun nuts and the GVP are quite happy promoting a massive gun ownership number that continues to increase. After all, if you’re the NRA, America’s oldest civil rights organization, the more guns owned by Americans, the more guns are just another mainstream, consumer product, all the more reason why we shouldn’t do anything about guns. On the other hand, the GVP community would find its recent organizational momentum slowing if, all of a sudden, gun ownership really started going down. What does seem to be declining is the percentage of American households which contain guns – from what appears to have been maybe half of all American homes in the 1970s now appears to be roughly thirty percent.

The problem in figuring out the size of the civilian stock is that the surveys assume that once a gun gets into the civilian arsenal, it should always be counted as if it still exists and, more to the point, could be a factor in the link between the size of the arsenal and our extraordinary rates of gun injuries and gun crimes. But anyone who ipso facto assumes this to be true may know very little about guns.

According to the NIJ report, roughly one-quarter of all guns owned in 1994 were inherited or received as gifts, a percentage which is probably higher today as the proportion of gun owners continues to go down. Know what these guns tend to be? Old, useless junk. I can’t tell you how many times the kids walk into my shop with a broken or rusted gun that’s been lying around the old man’s basement and now that the old man’s carted off to the nursing home or the cemetery, the old lady says to the kids, “get rid of the goddamn guns.” The average age of privately-owned guns in the NIJ report was 13+ years, which means that for every gun recently purchased, another one was at least a quarter-century old.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not denying the obvious connection between 300 million guns and 100,000 gun injuries and deaths every year. But if we believe that controlling those guns will reduce gun violence, we should understand which guns need to be controlled.

 

Available on Amazon.

 

Do More Guns Equal Less Crime? Not Any More.

August 30, 2024

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If I had a nickel for every time the NRA reminds us that gun violence is down while gun ownership is up, I wouldn’t have to work for a living. Not that writing is such hard work, mind you, but my previous comment still stands. And the latest ‘more guns = less crimes’ was just posted by the NRA, which linked to a comment by Charles Cooke in National Review, who compares current crime data to the numbers from 1993 and concludes that “national rates of gun violence are strikingly lower now than during their peak in the mid-1990s,” although he admits that the rate has “declined less dramatically since 2000.” The source cited by Cooke shows that 94% of the decline from 1993 occurred by 2000 and he refers to a 6% drop over the last 14 years as “less dramatic?”

This celebration of the drop in gun homicides coincident with the increase in gun sales has been spun again and again by the NRA and its helpmate, the NSSF. And while nobody has ever been able to determine whether there’s any causal relationship between gun purchases and crime rates, the coincidence of the latter going down while the former continues to go up is a major argument in the pro-gun playbook for promoting gun rights.

conference program pic There’s only one little problem, however. We won’t know for sure until early next year, but preliminary data appears to indicate that the two-decade drop in gun homicides has come to an end. The best numbers I can find do not come from the FBI, but from the CDC. And the reason why CDC numbers are more reliable is they are based on comprehensive state public health data which is based on coroner’s reports, whereas FBI numbers are based on local law enforcement agency data which is notoriously incomplete and, in fact, is not required to be reported at all.

The CDC data clearly indicates that the raw number of gun homicides stopped dropping by 2000, and the gun homicide rate has dropped minimally since 2000 as well. In 1993 gun homicides and rates were 18,253 and 6.75; in 1999 they were 10,828 and 3.83; in 2013 they were 11,208 and 3.55. Cooke’s statement that post-2000 gun violence has declined “less dramatically” is, to be polite, not consistent with the facts. And further, it should be noted that gun homicides stopped dropping exactly at the time when gun sales started rising; i.e., since 2009. Annual gun sales, as estimated by NICS background checks, have nearly doubled under Obama; gun homicides have remained stable or moved slightly up. So much for the nonsense about how guns and/or concealed weapons permits protect us from violent crime.

The news may get worse for 2015. The best real-time data I can find is captured by the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks gun violence through a combination of agency and media reports. This methodology has severe limitations, if only because media reports on gun violence by definition are woefully incomplete, and agency reporting is never done on a real-time basis. Which means that the 8,616 gun deaths counted by GVA so far this year must be an understatement, but it would still work out to nearly 13,000 gun deaths this year. And this increase is borne out by data from specific cities like Chicago, whose gun homicide rate is up over last year, ditto New York, ditto Milwaukee, St. Louis and Detroit.

It will be interesting to watch pro-gun zealots spin the news about how guns protect us from crime when gun sales continue to soar but so does violent crime. Who knows? Maybe they’ll decide that all those armed citizens walking around need to spend more time outside their homes making sure the streets are safe. Or maybe everyone should carry both a Glock and Bushmaster in plain sight. There’s really no limit to the fantasies you can concoct when the entire argument about how guns protect us from crime is based on facts that don’t exist. No limit at all.

 

 

 

 

Another Terrible Shooting - Another ‘Proof’ That We Should All Carry Guns.

August 26, 2024

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You can count on it. By tomorrow at the latest, whether or not all the facts are known, Mad Dig Lott or one of the other NRA sycophantic jack-offs will be saying that Alison Ward and Adam Parker of WDBJ are both dead because neither carried a gun. Said it after Sandy Hook, said it after Charleston, I guarantee you someone from the NRA stable will say it again. The NRA has been pitching this BIG LIE for more than twenty years, and the more that gun violence shocks, scares and angers the country, the more opportunities they get to roll it out.

open carry Why is the notion that armed citizens can protect us against crime a lie? Because it is. And it’s a lie for two reasons because neither reason corresponds to the facts. By facts I don’t mean the private poll conducted by Gary Kleck in 1994 which found that millions of crimes were prevented because of what 221 people claimed may or may not have occurred. Nor am I referring to the alleged poll by John Lott in 1997 for which all polling data then disappeared. I’m talking about facts as found in such ‘biased’ sources as the U.S. Census, the Department of Justice and the FBI. Of course they are biased if any information generated by them supports the notion that guns increase risk. But the same people who believe the government can never be trusted to tell the truth are the same people who get their real news from Infowars and other conspiracy-minded websites.

Lie #1: Even though violent crime has been dropping, we are all at risk for being attacked at any time the way that Ward and Parker were attacked while doing a fluff piece for the evening news. In fact, unless you are an African-American between the ages of 12 and 39, the odds of you being the victim of a gun homicide are about the same as the odds that you’ll be run over while crossing a street. Know anyone who was killed that way? Damn right you don’t, because the odds are about 50,000 to 1.

Lie #2: Millions of crimes are prevented each year because criminals are afraid to attack anyone who might be carrying a gun and the number of armed citizens keeps increasing every year. A study of more than 14,000 violent criminal incidents from 2007 to 2011 found that in less than 1% of these criminal events did the victim attempt to defend him/herself with a gun. And when a gun was used in self-defense during the commission of a crime, the odds the victim would suffer an injury were the same (4%) whether the victim had a gun or not. This study was not based on 221 private telephone survey conversations; it wasn’t based on a survey whose data then disappeared. It was based on the bi-annual crime victim survey conducted by the Department of Justice whose findings, of course, would never be accepted by President Trump.

The real problem with lying about the benefits of concealed-carry is that its proponents want you to believe that walking around with a self-defense weapon ipso facto means that you are trained and prepared to use it safely and effectively when, in fact, there’s no reason to believe such an assumption at all. A report just issued by the Police Executive Research Forum on the use of deadly force found that “the training currently provided to new recruits and experienced officers in most departments is inadequate,” and the “United States faces much more severe problems than most other countries, stemming from the widespread availability of inexpensive, high-quality firearms to almost anyone.”

If deadly force training for police is inadequate, what would you call the training provided to civilians who want to walk around with guns? I’d call it non-existent. And if you buy the NRA lie that armed, untrained civilians represent any kind of response to the violence that cut down Alison Ward and Adam Parker, you’ll probably believe that Donald Trump will really build a fence.

 

Do Guns Protect Us From Crime? Here’s A Serious Study That Says No.

October 15, 2024

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Sooner or later someone is going to realize that most of what the NRA claims to be the value of gun ownership simply isn’t true. Don’t get me wrong. I love guns, bought my first real gun when I was twelve years old and have owned hundreds ever since. But to me guns are a hobby, like model trains and toy soldiers, and I recoil in anger and disgust whenever the gun lobby tries to invest some kind of sacred value in their existence or use. And one of the biggest lies about gun ownership that is spun again and again is the idea that guns are an effective way to protect us against crime.

This nonsense first started making the rounds when a criminologist, Gary Kleck, published a paper in 1994 which claimed that Americans used guns several million times each year to prevent what would otherwise have been crimes. He didn’t say that gun owners shot their guns at would-be criminals; he said that gun owners let a potential criminal know that they were going up against someone with a gun. In fact, not a single person (less than 240 in a national survey) who claimed that they used a gun in this way could prove that their account of what happened was actually true. Not a single incident was reported to police or verified by anyone else. And in more than half the so-called defensive gun uses (DGUs) it turned out that the so-called criminal had neither said nor done anything that indicated criminal intent or any other kind of intent. How did the gun owner who committed the DGU know that he was preventing a crime from taking place? He didn’t.

John Lott

John Lott

Kleck’s work was shortly supported by another research hack named John Lott whose data that he used to “prove” that concealed-carry permits resulted in less crime turned out to be data that, to be polite, perhaps didn’t exist at all. When he was asked to produce his data by the National Academy of Sciences he couldn’t; when he produced what he claimed was “similar” data the National Academy’s analysts couldn’t replicate his findings at all. When other scholars took his substitute data and used a different methodology, the crime rates that Lott said went down actually went up.

Don’t think for one second that the inability of either Kleck or Lott to validate their research to an even minimal degree has stopped the gun lobby from promoting the idea that guns protect us from crime or has prevented the two erstwhile scholars from finding receptive audiences for continued showcasing of their work. Kleck routinely appears in courtrooms giving depositions and expert testimony on behalf of the NRA; Lott promotes himself endlessly and shamelessly on Fox and various right-wing blogs.

Now along comes a serious scholar named Michael Siegel who continues to provide us with peer-reviewed studies on gun violence which, to put It bluntly, shows the work of Kleck and Lott to be what it really is. In 2013, Siegel and his colleagues published a detailed article which found a significant correlation between gun ownership rates and gun homicides on a state-by-state basis. Previously, the work of Hemenway and others had demonstrated a possible link between elevated gun homicides and gun ownership on a national level; the research by Siegel and his team, focused on more state-level data, made the connection between guns and gun homicide much more specific and real.

The new study takes the state data on gun ownership and tests the correlation between gun ownership and whether the perpetrator and victim either knew each other or not. It turns out that gun ownership did not really alter the amount of gun homicides involving people who didn’t know each other, but gun homicides were significantly higher in gun-owning households where the perpetrator and victim did. Why didn’t the gun homicide rate decline between strangers if guns are such a good way of protecting us from crime? Because the studies which claim this to be true aren’t studies at all; they are promotional campaigns to sell more guns.

 

 

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