Tag Archives: gun research

Confessions of a Gun Nut.

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Over the next several weeks, I am going to serialize and publish a new book - Confessions of a Gun Nut. I’ll post each chapter on my Medium blog, and when it’s finished, I’ll publish it as an e-book.

The purpose of this book is to use the more than 50 years that I have been in the gun business (and more than 60 years since I bought my first, real gun) to try and figure out what I know and don’t know about guns.

Believe it or not, there’s a lot that I don’t know about guns. But I’m not about to kid myself into believing that because I can get my hands on some data, run the data through some statistical model or another and come up with some kind of ‘evidence-based’ conclusion, that I know anything about guns at all. And if I don’t know all that much about guns, the so-called experts on both sides of the argument know a lot less.

In fact, what I find most interesting about the gun debate is the lack of modesty which seems to infect the pronouncements and publications of the individuals who turn up again and again as the self-identified authorities whose views form the accepted narrative in the gun debate.

If anything, the pompous and self-fulfilling judgements about guns and gun violence emanating from the academic research community tend, if anything, to be further removed from reality than the screeching which erupts from the other side. This is because most of the pro-gun noisemaking comes from the groups and organizations which exist for the purpose of marketing guns. Which means, at the very least, that they have to know something about the people who might actually buy their products.

On the other hand, the anti-gun movement (which is what gun-control people really want - they are against guns) has to operate under greater restraints than the pro-gun folks, most of all because they are committed to making arguments which can or should be supported by facts. Now the fact that many of these so-called facts are nothing more than what this or that academic researcher claims to be facts - so what? In the greater scope of things what counts is whether your audience believes you or not.

Don’t worry - this isn’t going to be a kvetch by a pissed-off, former academic who didn’t get tenure and wants to get even with some of his tenured friends. First of all, I had academic tenure, so it’s not as if I’m sitting here all hot, bothered and jealous because gun-control researchers like Hemenway and Webster are inside the academy and I’m out. Second, I’m going to spend just as much time throwing slings and arrows at the pro-gun mob, if only because some of what they say is so dumb that it’s an insult even to their most ardent fans, and if anything, they often get away with it because their critics, being academics, often tend to be too polite. On the other hand, if the academic gun researchers are too courteous to their opponents, they tie themselves into knots with the degree to which they are deferential to the work conducted by their academic peers on the same side.

Again and again I hear my friends in the anti-gun movement talking about how they want to craft gun-control policies that will be ‘reasonable,’ thus appealing to all those ‘responsible’ gun owners out there who just can’t wait to join them in the ‘middle’ of the gun debate. And along with this mantra comes the continued lament about how the ‘gap’ between the two sides is unbridgeable, and hence, simply resists any fair attempt to narrow the divide.

To the credit of gun owners, most of them will tell you that there’s a simple way to end the gun debate, namely, just stop complaining about guns and accept the fact that anyone and everyone should be able to own a gun, notwithstanding the 125,000 or so deaths and injuries that occur every year. And they should be able to own these guns without going through all this nonsense about background checks, and concealed-carry permits, and safe storage, and all that other Big Government crap.

On the other hand, how come the rest of the industrial world makes do without guns and we can’t? Because if we agree that 125,000 deaths and injuries from the use of any specific product constitutes a crisis of public health, why should we put up with the continued availability of this product just because the Constitution says you can keep one in your home? The Commerce Clause also gives me the right to buy cigarettes. So what?

So stay tuned. The chapters to Confessions of a Gun Nut book will shortly start rolling out. And I promise to respond to any and all feedback, at least up to a point.

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Do We Really Need More Gun-Violence Research?

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Later this week I am scheduled to attend a two-day conference at the Academy of Sciences Health and Medicine Division Institute in Washington, D.C. The conference topic is: “Health Systems Intervention to Prevent Firearm Injuries and Death.” The purpose of the conference is to update recommendations for additional gun research, a task recommended by President Obama after Sandy Hook. Of course this would mean that the CDC research spigot would be turned back on. Yea, dream on.

I’m not going to the meeting because I do not believe we need any more research on gun violence. What are we going to find out? That there’s some way to point a gun at yourself or someone else, pull the trigger and not suffer an injury or death? Oh, I forgot. We can always do yet another study which assumes that keeping the gun ‘safely stored’ will reduce gun violence. Except other than a couple of hundred youngsters who are accidentally shot each year by a dumb parent or older (or younger) child, safe storage doesn’t do squat.

You don’t walk around with a gun safely stored. You walk around with a live gun because you believe it will protect you from someone else who has a gun, or from someone else who wants to steal your money, or from someone like the kid in Corpus Christie this past weekend who got into an argument with another family member “over nothing” (according to a witness) then pulled out a banger and – bang! – four people were dead.

The Urban Institute study indicates that one out of three adolescents and young men in certain Chicago neighborhoods either have or plan to walk around their neighborhood with a gun. These neighborhoods experience killing rates twenty or thirty times higher than the national fatal gun-violence rate. How did that happen?

If one more physician tells me that he or she would like to advise patients to avoid guns but, after all, the Constitution gives the patient the ‘right’ to own a gun, I’m going to suggest that said doctor go back and read the Hippocratic Oath which happens not to mention the Constitution at all. If a patient walked into a clinic and admitted to being a smoker, would a physician dare avoid telling the patient that he shouldn’t smoke? Because in case you didn’t know it, smoking is also a Constitutional ‘right.’ It’s Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 – the Commerce Clause. I can buy as many cigarettes as I want. In my state I have to be 21 to buy smokes. But I also have to be 21 to buy a handgun. How come the doctor insists that I shouldn’t exercise one Constitutional ‘right’ but I should just behave in a ‘reasonable’ way when I want to exercise the other Constitutional ‘right?’

Lester Adelson was Cuyahoga County coroner for almost thirty years. He had plenty of experience with gun violence and wrote a remarkable textbook on forensic homicide which should be read by everyone in the gun-control crowd. In 1980, he published what I believe is still the best and most concise opinion-piece on gun violence, and you can download it from my website here. I quote Adelson apropos of what happened in Corpus Christie: “With its peculiar lethality, a gun converts a spat into a slaying and a quarrel into a killing.”

Next time you buy a gun (ha ha) open the box and you will find an owner’s manual. If you don’t want to buy a gun, you can read one right here. Notice right on the first page it says in big, bold, red letters: “FAILURE TO FOLLOW THESE WARNINGS MAY RESULT IN SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH TO YOU AND OTHERS.”

If gun makers don’t try to hide the fact that their products are dangerous, why do we need more research to learn the same thing? Since the medical community hasn’t figured this one out I’ll explain it: you reduce gun risk by getting rid of the risk. Gee, that was a tough one.

 

 

Do Comprehensive Background Checks Reduce Gun Violence? Not So Far.

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Last week I posted a detailed paper on the Social Science Research Network in which I examined the arguments made by public health researchers and gun-control advocacy groups about the relationship between gun laws and gun violence; i.e., the stronger and more comprehensive the gun-control laws, the more gun violence goes down.

You can download and read the paper here, but I can save you some time by summarizing what I said. In brief, the point I made about the more gun laws = less gun violence is that the causal relationship between these two factors is vague, at best, and the way in which Brady and Giffords go about defining and judging the efficacy of different laws leaves some pretty big gaps.

The problem with trying to figure out whether any particular law will have any particular effect is that the only way to come up with a reasonably-accurate analysis is to compare the relevant behavior both before and after the law is passed. But even studies which compare before-and-after behavior on what would appear to be a simple issue like speed limits and accident rates, often cannot take into account all the myriad social factors which affect a certain type of behavior beyond the existence or non-existence of a certain law. And if we know one thing about the behavior which produces gun violence, or any kind of violence for that matter, the origins, incidence and reasons for this behavior are terribly complicated and not given to any kind of simple or single cause.

On the other hand, for the first time we finally can look at the effects of a major change in gun laws, not just in terms of whether the new law made any real difference in gun violence rates, but whether the legal change met the expectations and claims of the advocate community which pushed for the change. I am referring to requiring FBI-NICS background checks for all gun transfers, which is probably Gun-control Nation’s single, most cherished goal, particularly because it happens to be the gun law where even gun owners appear to be falling into line; a recent public health survey found that more than 80% of both gun owners and non-gun owners agreed that comprehensive FBI-NICS checks were a good thing.

According to Brady, only 7 states currently impose comprehensive background checks on all gun sales. But four of these states – Colorado, Delaware, New York, Washington – passed their laws after the unspeakable tragedy at Newtown-Sandy Hook. As of 2014, all four states required that any change in the ownership of any kind of gun had to be validated by the intervention of a gun dealer who would initiate a background check. None of these states had a comprehensive background check law prior to 2014.

And here are the results by state, gun-violence rate and two years prior and two years after passage of a comprehensive background check law:

State 2012 2013 2015 2016
CO 2.22 2.01 2.51 2.91
DE 5.02 4.11 5.61 4.62
NY 2.22 1.93 2.07 1.98
WA 1.84 1.66 2.26 2.00

 

Note that New York was the only state which showed a decline in gun violence after a comprehensive law was passed, but this anomaly is probably explained by the aggressive, anti-gun program of the New York City cops. In Erie County, which includes Buffalo, the 2013 gun-violence rate was 4.1, it then dipped in 2015 to 3.88, but in 2016 went back to 4.1.

In a recent study that attempted to differentiate the impact of comprehensive background checks (CBC), as opposed to CBC which also required specific licensing for each gun sale (permit to purchase or PTP), researchers found “no benefit of a CBC system without a PTP law.” But what if comprehensive background checks, rather than yielding no result, actually coincide with a significant increase in gun-violence rates? Oops! That’s not what gun-control laws are supposed to do. Not at all.

Does Public Health Research Explain Gun Violence?

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Now that the gun-grabbing, liberal elite has decided that the way to reduce gun violence is through a ‘public health’ approach, I thought I would summarize what we know:

  • 74% of all victims of intentional fatal gun injuries committed by one person against another are men and women ages 14 – 30, of whom 40% are African-Americans who account for less than 15% of all Americans within that age group.

That is what public health research can definitively tell us about gun violence. The research does state many other things, such as the link between gun laws and gun violence rates; such as the connection between lack of safe gun storage and gun injuries; such as gun homicides increasing when permit-to-purchase procedures are replaced by instant background checks. None of those findings, however, are definitive, and when public health scholars refer to gun violence as embracing an epidemiological approach to the problem, they are surrounding their research with an aura of scientific nomenclature which it doesn’t yet deserve.

Not to worry, I’m not turning into a pro-gun curmudgeon who all of a sudden believes that gun violence prevention (GVP) goals and objectives need to be thrown aside. To the contrary, thanks to the Parkland kids and the overwhelming revulsion of D.D.D. Trump, his pimp attorney Cohen and the rest of the merry band, there may actually be a chance for some effective and much-needed gun-control strategies to become law of the land. All the more reason why we need to scrutinize what we know and still need to know about gun violence with a fine-tooth comb.

And here is where taking a ‘public health approach’ to gun violence can make things fuzzy rather than clear. The first time an illness appears, it may be due to nothing other than some spontaneous, physiological event. But the moment it appears in more than one person, we need to figure out how it got from Victim A to Victim B – the transmission mechanism – which often requires us to figure out the identity of the carrier, even if that individual never exhibits the symptoms of the germ himself. It didn’t take long to figure out that AIDS was found overwhelmingly in the gay community and amongst individuals who were addicted to injected drugs. But what was the exact manner in which it spread?

We face exactly the same problem with understanding gun violence because, as opposed to most injuries (cars, falls, etc.) in the case of guns it takes two to tango; the injured party and the person whose behavior resulted in the injury aren’t one and the same. So, while public health research tells us an awful lot about the victim of this medical event, we know next to nothing about why someone else transmits this medical condition by shooting off a gun.

Our friends at the UC-Davis Violence Prevention Research Program have put up a very comprehensive resource to can be used by health-care providers who want to identify gun risk amongst their patients and counsel about same. The website contains a basic checklist of symptoms which indicate risk (violent behavior, abusive parents, substance abuse, et. al.,) behavior which has been validated by endless public health research over the past 25 years.

There’s only one little problem – these symptoms are exhibited by people who commit violence whether or not they use a gun. And less than 5% of the individuals who try to physically injure someone else each year use a gun. How come the other 95% don’t? With 300 million guns floating around, it can’t be because there’s any great difficulty getting their hands on a gun.

Until and unless we focus on the shooters and not just on the victims, I am afraid that the ‘public health approach’ to gun violence will not necessarily provide the answers we seek. And if we don’t fully understand how and why people use guns in inappropriate or illegal ways, how do we craft effective public policies to make those behaviors change?

GVPedia - Good To Go!

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Every once in a while, someone comes along with a really bright idea for doing something positive or useful about reducing gun violence. Not that joining an advocacy group or sending an email to your local Congressman isn’t a positive idea, but it’s not very new. On the other hand, there’s a young man sitting, of all places in Oklahoma, who has done something positive and new to reduce gun violence, which is funny given the Oklahoma is probably the most gun-rich state of all.

I’m talking about Devin Hughes and a new website, GVPedia, which had a soft launch last month and now is good to go. The site is basically a reference library containing publications which inform about gun violence, and to his credit, the collection of more than 700 articles includes work on both sides of the gun debate – I suspect this is the only online venue which allows a visitor to access articles written by David Hemenway and John Lott. But if you want to create a credible knowledge source about any topic, then you need to include all points of view.

The website bibliography can be searched either by topic or the usual a to z. There is also a small but growing collection of ‘white papers’ designed to give members of the gun violence prevention (GVP) community some basic information and talking-points if/when they find themselves in a public or private discussion about guns. I understand that plans are afoot to make the site more dynamic, including sponsoring gun-violence research, developing infographics that could be used for online debates – all of these activities and others being directed by Jen Pauliukonis, whose GVP creds are far beyond reproach.

So that’s the good news, and I want to congratulate Devin, his Board members and his major financial supporter (who wishes to remain anonymous but it’s not Mayor Mike) for moving this whole effort forward and getting it online. But that was the easy part, now the heavy lifting begins.

First and foremost (and I’m sure Devin and his crew have been talking about this but it needs to be said publicly nonetheless) even though GVPedia is unique to the discussion about guns, this uniqueness in and of itself doesn’t mean that the site and its associated activities will necessarily get the exposure or public presence which it deserves and needs. As much as I believe that the 1st Amendment should apply to what appears on the web, I find sometimes myself thinking that maybe getting rid of net neutrality isn’t such a bad idea. Because if nothing else, eliminating open access might (but might not) tend to curb some of the excessive digital content which continues to grow every day. I put up my first website, believe it or not, in 1995. And it was easy to build an audience because where else were the early internet surfers going to go?

I have an idea for getting GVPedia noticed, however, by a very wide audience, an idea which may or may not align with the strategies of the website’s managers, but perhaps should be taken into account. I would run some notices on websites, blogs and Facebook pages not just favored by the GVP, but used by Gun-nut Nation to communicate amongst themselves. For example, I belong to a bunch of private Facebook groups which promote guns; one of them is devoted to building your own AR-15 and more than 75,000 people have joined. One of the Glock private groups on Facebook enlists more than 30,000 followers – such numbers aren’t unusual on many of the better-known gun blogs.

Donald Trump started a ‘university’ so that he could peddle some drek. By opening GVPedia to researchers from both sides of the gun debate, Devin and his crew have made it very clear that the ultimate value of this effort rests on a search for truth. So why not invite everyone to join the search?

And by the way, GVPedia is a 501(c)(3). Send them a few bucks.

Do You Know How To Use A Gun To Protect Yourself From Crime?

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Even though I write for Huffington Post, I have to admit that The Guardian frequently carries writing about guns and gun violence which should be read. In fact, for several years they ran a superb open-source compilation about police use of lethal force, which my friend Frank Zimring used for a very important book on cops and shootings which also should be read.

Now The Guardian has announced a new effort, Break the Cycle, a series designed “to change the way the media covers American gun violence – and to challenge the orthodoxy that gun reform is a hopeless pursuit.” To that end, the very first story covers what The Guardian calls “ten recent victories in gun violence prevention,” most of which are of too recent vintage to determine whether these new initiatives will make a difference or not. But even if the jury is still out on whether or not such programs and laws will reduce the violence suffered from guns, at least the fear that all gun-control activity will wither and die during the Age of Trump appears to be misplaced.

I’m beginning to consider the possibility, in fact, that the defeat of Hillary, who based much of her campaign narrative on gun-control themes, may actually turn out to be a more positive event for the gun violence prevention (GVP) movement than if she had won. Her victories in the several swing states she needed to grab the necessary 270 electoral votes would not have turned the Congress from red to blue, and facing the same hostile Congressional lineup that blocked Obama after his first two years would probably would have doomed any substantial gun legislation from moving ahead. On the other hand, one can argue that absent a Republican in the Oval Office that some of the crazy, pro-gun bills like national concealed-carry, would also never see the light of day.

But sometimes adversity becomes the incubator for new and compelling ideas, and the policy brief issued this morning by The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research represents just such an effort to focus our attention on work which needs to be done. The report, Concealed Carry of Firearms; Facts Versus Fiction, covers the arguments used to justify national concealed-carry (CCW) reciprocity, and then gives a balanced and evidence-based analysis of each. The text begins with a summary of CCW laws currently in force throughout the 50 states: no CCW licensing requirements in 12 states, and a CCW license must be automatically granted in 30 other states if one meets the legal requirements for simply owning a gun. In 1986 there were 9 states that did not impose any CCW requirements if one passed a background check – now that number has climbed to 42.

I wouldn’t be so adamantly opposed to national CCW were it not for the fact that what this means is the current issuance of CCW in many states without any kind of training at all will now become an accepted norm in every state. Not that jurisdictions which require a pre-licensing gun course impose anything except the most slipshod and useless qualification process, and once you demonstrate that you actually know the difference between the stock and the barrel you never have to certify your ability again.

I’m not surprised when folks tell me that a gun will make protect them from crime, even if evidence-based research indicates otherwise. After all, emotions usually trump facts, even when we think we are using valid evidence to figure something out. But the continued drumbeat by Gun-nut Nation and the NRA to make people believe that using a gun for personal defense without continuous, qualification-based and mandated (i.e., required) training is just another attempt to appeal to the lowest mental denominator when it comes to talking about guns. The organization which was founded as a training organization in 1871 should be at the forefront of an effort to tell everyone how useless this national CCW legislation will be.

I thank the Bloomberg gun-grabbers for this fine report.

 

 

Is The Narrative on Gun Violence All It Should Be?

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Our friends at Media Matters have just posted a new report on gun violence prepared and published by a California gun violence prevention (GVP) group, the Hope and Heal Fund, which looks at how the media has and hasn’t covered gun violence issues. The report, which can be downloaded here, looked at 218 newspaper articles and thousands of tweets in 2016-2017 in an attempt to develop a baseline understanding of the gun violence narrative in California, as well as making some suggestions about how the narrative might be changed.

The researchers found that gun policies were the dominant conversation in print and social media, accounting for 40% of the total narrative, with mass shootings provoking another 15%, crime and policing covering 15% more. In other words, nearly three-quarters of the entire public discussion about gun violence in California focused on issues other than the issue which accounts for just about all gun violence, namely, the individual gun shootings – suicide, street gangs, domestic disputes – which account for nearly all intentional gun injuries both in California and everywhere else.

As to what the report calls the ‘messengers’ who were quoted on gun violence, again the data was skewed in favor of public policies because 40% of the people who had something to say about the issue were identified as politicians, whereas researchers, advocacy groups and victims each constituted 9 percent. Taken together, these three groups would constitute in broad terms the California GVP community, and what’s interesting is that as one group, the number of times they delivered a message about gun violence was more than twice as frequent as what the researchers identified as the ‘gun lobby,’ whose total participation in the public media discussion was 12 percent.

Maybe because it’s California and not Texas or some other gun-hugging state, I am nevertheless surprised that the gun-control contributions to the media coverage of gun violence is so much greater than what Gun-nut Nation was able to produce. You would think that given the fact that there have been major changes in California gun laws over the last several years, as well as highly-publicized gun ‘rights’ legal cases such as Peruta v. California, that the NRA and other pro-gun organizations would have been all over the social media world blasting about this gun issue or that. But this report tells a much different story about the relative strength of the two sides, at least in the Golden State.

Now we come to the part of the report which gives me some concern. “Based on our findings,” says the Report’s conclusion, “we have developed the following recommendations for Hope and Heal Fund’s efforts to change the narrative on gun violence in California.” The recommendations involve: more attention to suicide, domestic violence and gangs; reminding people that much policy work remains to be done; highlight the words and deeds of community leaders; look to the public health area for more research; highlight personal stories about victims; and, “depoliticize gun violence by appealing to common values. Sidestep political opposition by crafting messages that emphasize universal values like safety, opportunity and freedom from fear.”

Sidestep political opposition? Who’s kidding whom? The California gun-rights gang just got the Los Angeles City Council to end a ban on sale of ultra-concealable handguns (guns less than 6.75 inches long) although it’s not clear how many of the really little guns would meet compliance standards of the state law. But if anyone believes that people who are buying guns because they are afraid of crime or terrorists or whatever are going to be persuaded that there are other ways they can legally protect themselves, perhaps you could enlighten me as to what these non-gun options might be.

I’m not against any of the proposals for strengthening the gun-control narrative but I think there’s one proposal which the writers of this report appeared to have missed, namely, just get rid of the guns. Shouldn’t someone be doing some social media messaging on that?

 

What Kind Of Training Do Gun Owners Receive? None At All.

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I have decided that it’s time for Mike the Gun Guy to become a little less polite (imagine – Mike the Gun Guy ‘less’ polite) and start responding to some of the things that are said on the gun violence prevention (GVP) side which I feel hold us back, rather than help us to move ahead. This decision should not be taken in any way, shape or form as a criticism or even a concern about the importance and necessity of GVP. To the contrary, as a fundamental issue with which all Americans to be engaged, in the Age of Trump GVP tops the list.

Last week a group of public health gun researchers published the results of a national survey which found that 4 out of 10 Americans who are legally allowed to walk around with a gun (CCW) have not received any gun training at all. And the results of this survey are not much different from similar surveys published in 1994, except that the number of CCW-holders has probably doubled, if not tripled from that earlier date.

That a majority of people who can legally walk around with a concealed weapon have received some kind of formal gun training is now validated again by the results of this survey, and the narrative will slowly but surely circulate throughout the public domain and in and around the GVP. On the other hand, the fact that four out of ten CCW-holders have not engaged in any formal gun training demonstrates the degree to which “no national standards or requirements for firearm training in the USA exist.” And this lack of consistent standard (or any standard for that matter) regarding how to use a gun is particularly concerning given the expected push by the Republicans who might not get a new healthcare law but just might vote through a national, reciprocal CCW law that their President will surely sign.

There’s only one little problem with this survey and by pro-GVP media efforts to publicize the findings hither and yon, namely, that despite what the researchers believe they were asking respondents to tell them, what in fact they were asking respondents in this survey had nothing to do with training at all. Know where the word ’training’ comes from as it applies to guns? It’s a word first used by the NRA which was actually founded as a ‘training’ organization in 1873. Not only does the NRA continue to promote themselves as America’s premier gun-training organization, but they have launched a new training effort focusing on CCW techniques called Carry Guard, which they refer to as a “first-rate, elite program” aimed (pardon the pun) at people who lead the ‘concealed-carry lifestyle’ and want to be ready for ‘real-life situations you must be prepared to face.’

This isn’t training - it’s a sham. It’s used to entice people to purchase an insurance policy which will allegedly pay all their legal fees after they shoot someone, assuming they don’t get convicted for some kind of felony committed while they were using their gun. Along with this training program, the NRA now offers its standard training programs on video, and these programs are used by most CCW-issuing authorities in states where pre-CCW training is still required. What’s the difference between NRA video training and video games like Call of Duty that you can play on your X-Box? There is no difference.

I’m an old-fashioned guy so words have meanings, whether we like the meanings or not. I think GVP is making a profound mistake using words whose meaning has been distorted beyond all recognition by the NRA. If GVP is going to convince people that what they say about gun violence is true and what the other side says is false, then the words we use should be our words and not words that are bandied about by the NRA in order to help sell more guns.

And what I just said about GVP applies to public health researchers as well.

A Little Suggestion For Funding Gun Violence Research.

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One of Gun-sense Nation’s primary concerns that will now linger in an unfinished state is the question of funding public health research into guns. The major funding source – CDC – was shut down in the 1990s, but while private sources stepped in to try and close the gap, much important work remains undone. And analyzing both this unfinished agenda and its implications for gun violence prevention (GVP) advocacy and policy are the subjects of a commentary by Everytown’s innovation director, Ted Alcorn, that recently appeared in a JAMA issue published online.

Before I go further into Alcorn’s discussion, I need to make my own thoughts and biases about gun-violence research clear. As someone who holds a Ph.D. in Economic History and published several university monographs on same before getting into writing about guns, I would never, ever suggest or imply that serious research on any topic is anything other than a good thing. But I am occasionally dismayed by what I perceive to be a desire on the part of gun-violence researchers to present themselves as being ‘neutral’ or ‘unbiased’ when it comes to the reason they study violence caused by guns. I don’t think that a researcher should feel at all reluctant to state the obvious, which is that without guns there would be no gun violence. And if the political powers-that-be feel that 120,000 gun deaths and injuries each year are a price worth paying for a cynically-invented fiction known as 2nd-Amendment ‘rights,’ there’s no reason why any serious researcher should pay respectful homage to all that Constitutional crap. Because it’s not as if Gun-nut Nation would ever believe that any research into gun violence could be free of bias anyway since they don’t believe there’s really anything called ‘gun violence’ at all.

But let’s get back to what Ted Alcorn has to say. He and his research group looked at 2,207 scholarly articles published between 1960 and 2014, and discovered that the number of yearly articles doubled between 1984 and 1990, then doubled again between 1990 and 1994-95, then doubled again by the early 2000’s, and then plateaued until they increased again noticeably in 2013-14. In other words, the volume of gun research as measured by the number of published articles has not specifically increased since the mid-90’s, except for what has recently happened, no doubt due to the fallout from Sandy Hook.

More problematic than the fact that the number of scholarly resources has been essentially unchanged for the last twenty years is that the general interest in gun violence research, as measured by the number of times that scholarly articles are cited, reached a high-watermark in 1988 and then declined more than 60% through 2012. This corresponds with the fact that the number of active gun-violence researchers also plateaued in the late 1990’s and has not increased ever since.

The problem facing gun research is not the absence of research funding per se. It’s that the absence of research dollars tends to discourage new researchers from entering the field. And when all is said and done, advances in science have a funny way of growing because more people not only conduct that research in a particular field, but also share their research, critique each other’s research and, most of all, conduct more research.

I think the idea that manna from heaven will ever again appear for government-sponsored gun violence research is a non-starter at best, a pipe dream at worst. But I have an idea that I want to run up the flagpole about where to find money for this kind of research. There’s a little foundation out there which happens to be sitting on $400 million bucks. They refer to what they do as ‘life-changing work.’ What could be more life-changing than saving the lives of 120,000 Americans each year who are killed and injured by guns? The outfit is run by Donna Shalala who gave out plenty of gun-violence research money when she headed HHS from 1993 to 2001. Shouldn’t Gun-sense Nation give her a call?

Ending Gun Violence Means Understanding Gun Violence And Here’s A Good Start.

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So now we have the second report in as many weeks that strongly points to the connection between gun violence and gun laws; i.e., less of the latter produces more of the former. The first report came from the Center for American Progress (CAP) which found that states with fewer legal restrictions on guns have higher rates of gun violence; now we have another report issued by New York State’s Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, which shows that states with lax gun regulations also export more crime guns to other states, hence raising gun violence rates in states which often have very strict and comprehensive controls.

So the bottom line is that states that do not view guns as a threat to community safety not only make their own communities less safe but also help to make communities elsewhere dangerous as well. And if you believe that this is in any way a new discovery, let me take you back the passage of the Federal Firearms Act in 1938. The FFA38 was actually the second gun bill passed during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, the first being the 1934 law that regulated sale and ownership of full-automatic weapons and sawed-off shotguns whose use became the staple of Hollywood gangster movies then and now.

The 1938 law moved the Federal government into gun regulation big-time, because it focused not on the control of these somewhat exotic and relatively unusual (and relatively expensive) machine guns, but established the regulation of standard, run-of-the-mill handguns and long guns which could be found in probably a majority of American homes. Moreover, the basic components of the 1938 law, even though much of it was revised by the Gun Control Act of 1968, created the regulatory environment which exists to the present day. To wit:

After 1938, anyone who wanted to be in the business of selling firearms, as opposed to simply collecting and transferring personal guns, had to acquire and operate the business with a federal firearms license issued by the Treasury Department. Why the Treasury Department? Because the license cost one buck, and anyone who paid anything to the U.S. Government paid to the U.S. Treasury. The law also made it illegal if a felon, fugitive, or anyone ‘convicted of a crime of violence’ received a gun and, most important, required that federally-licensed gun dealers only transfer guns to individuals who were residents of the same state in which the dealer sold guns. The law was later revised to exempt long guns from the in-state purchase requirement (hence Lee Harvey Oswald was able to purchase and directly receive a rifle from a sporting-goods dealer in Chicago) but the requirement that handgun sales be limited to in-state transfers remained law from then until now.

Why has the government always required that handgun ownership be more rigorously regulated than long guns? Because the basic purpose of federal gun regulations is to “provide support to Federal, State and local law enforcement officials in their fight against crime and violence.” So says the Gun Control Act of 1968, a law which, incidentally, was supported by the NRA.

Note that neither the 1938 gun law nor the law passed thirty years later or, for that matter, the third big law passed in 1994 attempted to regulate guns per se; all three laws were attempts to break the connection between guns, crime and violence by defining which individuals could acquire guns. But none of these laws defined gun violence for what it really is.

Gun violence is a pathogen and most pathogens spread through human contact, which is certainly the case with the pathogen caused by guns. We still don’t know exactly how, when or why this human contact takes place, but the reports issued by CAP and New York’s AG provide a good start. They also provide valid methodological templates to be used for further research. In sum, these reports deserve to be read, discussed and their value applauded and understood.