If The NRA Really Believes That Their Gun Safety Programs Work, Shouldn’t They Be Willing To Prove It?

March 4, 2024

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Since 1999 there has been a nearly 30% decline in accidental gun deaths, with a 50% drop in deaths for children under 19. This is a remarkable decrease in unintentional gun mortality when you consider that during the same fifteen years, the civilian gun arsenal has probably increased by nearly 50%. So what’s going on? Are gun owners becoming more careful with their guns? Are gun manufacturers making guns that are more resistant to accidental discharges? Are gun safety programs working beyond anyone’s wildest dreams?

docs versus glocks If you listen to the NRA and the NSSF, they’ll tell you that their safety programs are simply the best and most effective that they can be. The NSSF runs a program called ChildSafe, which they claim is responsible for sending more than 36 million safety “kits” to more than 15,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide. The kits basically consist of a little brochure and a gun lock which are then handed out free of charge by the cops to anyone who walks through the door. The NSSF also sponsors occasional safety programs at participating retailers like BassPro, and has produced some thoroughly stupid videos telling parents how to sit around the dinner table and talk to their kids about guns.

The NRA safety program, Eddie Eagle, has been around since 1988, and its safety pamphlets and other teaching aids have “reached” 28 million schoolchildren, whatever the word ‘reached’ actually means. I’ll tell you what it means. It means that someone in Fairfax has mailed out 28 million pieces of paper to various schools around the United States. Maybe not just to schools; maybe to summer camps, maybe to the local VFW, maybe to this or that shooting range, maybe to who knows where. Back in 1991 a graduate nursing student looked at some gun safety programs and judged Eddie Eagle to have all the necessary content to teach good gun safety rules to kids. There was only one little problem: the author also stated that there had never been any study which could determine whether Eddie Eagle was effective as a teaching tool.

And that’s why programs like ChildSafe and Eddie Eagle can’t be taken seriously, for the simple reason that mailing out some literature on anything doesn’t mean that anyone actually received it, or read it, or changed their behavior in any way at all. The fact that safety brochures were being mailed to schools and gun locks were being mailed to police departments and gun mortality declined during the same years may appear to represent some kind of cause and effect, but nobody has ever conducted a study to see if these two factors are connected in any way, shape or form. And this connection becomes even more problematic when we include non-fatal shootings over the same period of years.

When we examine non-fatal accidental shootings, the five-year average between 2001-2006 and 2009-2013 drops by a whopping 7%. And remember how gun mortality for kids declined by 50%? For this same age group in terms of non-fatal accidents the number has basically remained the same since 2003. Now you can’t tell me that people who shoot themselves accidentally are aiming at less lethal parts of their bodies. What’s happening is that the same medical advances which result each year in a higher proportion of non-fatal gun assaults to fatal gun assaults is making unintentional gun injuries less lethal as well.

The NRA uses its Eddie Eagle program, among other things, to fight against doctors who want to caution patients about the risks presented by guns. They argue that a more effective process would be for doctors to distribute Eddie Eagle brochures. I would be the first person to stand up and loudly proclaim that Eddie Eagle should be adopted by every physician once the NRA conducts a valid before-and-after analysis to determine whether the program actually works. But don’t hold your breath – you may turn blue long before the NRA responds.

A Holiday Safety Message From Everytown Which We Should All Read.

November 21, 2024

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I’m very lucky. Every year when the holidays roll around I’m one of those people who will spend time with a loving, supportive family, entertain and visit friends and even attend an office party from which, if I’m careful, I can drive myself home. But the holidays also mark a time when many of us don’t do so well; we are alone, or depressed, or drink too much during this and other times of the year. Some of us don’t have family, don’t have friends, the Thanksgiving dinner if we’re lucky, is consumed at a shelter or in the street.

everytown logo I’m sure you, like me, have responded to requests for donations to this or that program which will bring some cheer into other people’s lives. Americans are generous, we like to help those in need. I’ll pay for some dinners to be served at a halfway house, my neighbor runs Toys for Tots at our local KofC. Which is why I was heartened to see that Everytown has just posted a Holiday Safety Message on its Be Smart campaign. Because gun accidents, more than any other kind of safety issue, are chilling and scary events. And if you don’t believe me, just ask the residents of Hayden, ID, who had to find the strength to get through the Holidays last year after a young and vigorous Mom was shot dead in Walmart by her two-year old son.

The Everytown holiday safety message continues a safety campaign started last year which tries to remind parents that there are ways to deal positively and properly with the risks of guns. It’s a no-brainer to lock guns up when they’re not being used; ditto keep them unloaded around the home and, most important, always keep guns out of the hands of kids. Children are naturally curious, they have no sense of risk or fear, they teach themselves about the world by touching everything around them and for sure this includes guns.

The gun industry has been promoting its own brand of gun safety largely through the ChildSafe program run by the NSSF. The program distributes gun locks and safety literature and encourages parents to talk to their children about safe behavior around guns. But what this program does not do is tell parents to talk to other parents about their guns. And this is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, because parents who send their children to play at someone else’s home have a right to know whether that home is safe. And like it or not, no matter what the NRA says about the benefits of gun ownership outweighing the risks, the fact is that a home with a gun inside it is a home where a gun accident could take place.

In 2013, the last year for which we have good data, 16,864 Americans were the victims of non-fatal, unintentional injuries from guns. Now listen carefully: 14,886 were males and 16,326 were over the age of 15. In other words, when it comes to accidental shootings, what we are really talking about are boys and men playing with their own guns. Now don’t get me wrong; every life is precious and nobody should endure the heartache and pain of losing a life, particularly the very young. But gun safety, when all is said and done, is a function of the fact that we are humans which means we are careless and we forget. The real value of Everytown’s holiday safety message is that it serves as a reminder that a memory lapse with a gun can have a terrible effect.

If there’s one thing the pro-gun community has decided is that groups like Everytown are just promoting gun safety to disguise the fact that the real goal is to confiscate all guns. Let me break it to the pro-gun folks gently – there wouldn’t be any reason for Everytown to talk about gun safety if gun owners would all lock up their guns.

 

 

 

Are We Safe By Locking Up Or Locking Away The Guns? I’m Not So Sure.

November 9, 2024

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Every week, if not more frequently, the media carries yet another story about a young kid who kills himself or someone else, often a parent, with a gun. And I’m not talking ‘young kids’ as in twelve year olds. I’m talking like young kids who have not yet reached the age of five.

Last year, a few days after Chsristmas, a two-year old got into his mother’s pocketbook while she was shopping in a Walmart, yanked out her Smith & Wesson pistol that she was carrying for self-defense, pulled the trigger and shot her dead. A month later in New Mexico the victims were a father and mother whose three-year-old son shot them both in a motel. It’s really gruesome when this kind of shooting takes place but it seems to happen all the time.

When it comes to this kind of gun violence, everyone in the gun debate appears to be on the same side, at least up to a point. The GVP community wants mandatory CAP laws extended to every state; the gun gang is opposed to any mandatory legal fix, but never lets a day go by without reminding us that they have distributed more than 36 million locks and kits that teach young shooters how to be safe around guns. Is there a single medical organization or pro-gun group that hasn’t come out one way or the other in favor of locking up or locking away the guns?

With all due respect to the honest energies and safety concerns on both sides of the gun debate, I happen to think that the ‘lock ‘em up, lock ‘em away’ approach to gun safety is a little bit beside the point. Or to put it another way, to promote gun safety with trigger locks and safe storage is kind of like using an elephant to swat a flea. Here are the numbers. According to the CDC, in 2013 there were 505 unintentional deaths and 16,864 non-fatal injuries involving guns. Of these totals, 69 kids under the age of 15 were accidentally shot to death, 538 under the age of 15 were injured fooling around with a gun. If every civilian-owned gun in the United States was locked up or locked every night, and every loaded gun that wasn’t secured was kept away from every kid, the death and injury toll from gun accidents would drop by slightly more than 3 percent! And please, please don’t start with how every human life is sacred and should be spared. I’m not talking about theology or compassion, I’m talking about whether the policies we adopt for dealing with a medical condition which kills or injures more than 17,000 Americans each year are policies that will yield results.

Know why people accidentally wound or injure themselves or others with a gun each year? Because we are human beings, and as human beings we are prone to make mistakes, do stupid things, act in careless ways or are just plain dumb. Want the best example I can find? Take a look at this video of a cop buying an off-duty gun with which he shot himself in the hand:

Stupid #1: Clerk didn’t check to see if the gun was loaded.

Stupid #2: Cop didn’t check either.

Stupid #3: Cop points gun at someone else.

Stupid #4: Cop sticks his hand in front of the barrel.

Stupid #5: Cop accidentally drops mag and at the same time shoots off the gun.

 

Now go back, watch the video again, and while it’s rolling repeat these words: Pledge, practice, promote firearm safety. Say it a couple of more times while the video rolls again. Know what you just said? You just said the Glock Firearm Safety Pledge.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve never advocated banning guns and I never will. But anyone who thinks that with 300 million lethal weapons floating around we are going to prevent 17,000 people from behaving like jerks each and every year doesn’t know anything about guns. Or about jerks.

When The NRA Talks About Gun Safety, It Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means.

August 12, 2024

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With all the talk about how easy it is to get a gun through the internet, it figures that sooner or later gun dealers would start using wireless apps to spread the word about products, prices and where a gun nut should go if he wants to pick up another gun. And the company that is kicking off this new venue is owned by a family now in its third generation of using media to promote guns. The company, GunDealio, is the brainchild of Tom and Ryan Gresham, whose father and grandfather respectively was ‘Grits’ Gresham, who got into outdoor sports journalism and was host of the ABC television show, American Sportsman, from 1966 until 1979.

The new company is another offshoot of the Gresham media empire called GunTalk Media, which produces television and radio shows about guns and shooting and in particular is known for a radio show called GunTalk, which is syndicated nationally and usually plays Sunday afternoons on whatever AM talk-radio station captures the gun-owning crowd.

The GunDealio app, which can be downloaded to iOS or Google, allows gun dealers to list whatever special deals will get customers into their stores. As the number of app-holders grows, the plan is to let each gun shop push a notice or ad onto the mobile devices of everyone in the market area of that store, which means that as someone goes cruising down the street on the way to wherever they want to go, all of a sudden they’ll get a text or a pic which tells them to make a quick turn right in order to stop off and save thirty bucks on a new Glock.

It doesn’t surprise me that the Greshams or someone else would sooner or later come up with a mobile app that promotes the sale of guns. Gun buyers are first and foremost hobbyists, they love to wander in and out of multiple stores and they’ll think nothing of taking off on a Saturday afternoon after they’ve finished the ‘honey-dos’ and driving fifty or a hundred miles to drop into two or three gun shops.

What I found interesting about the GunDealio story was not the use of mobile sales ‘push’ technology, which is becoming a standard part of sales and marketing strategies no matter what consumer product category is being discussed. Rather, that I found interesting was the description of the mission of GunTalk Media which, according to the Greshams, produce shows that focus on “firearms, hunting and personal safety.”

Whoa! Personal safety? You mean media productions that explain the hows and whys of using guns in a safe way? Just goes to show how little I really understand about an industry with which I have been involved for nearly forty years. Because when the Greshams talk about ‘personal safety,’ they’re not talking about locking the guns or locking them away. Actually, they get a fair share of advertising from companies that manufacture gun safes, but that has nothing to do with gun safety from their point of view.

What the Greshams mean when they use the term ‘gun safety’ is what the entire gun industry really means when they trot out that phrase, namely, how to use a gun to protect yourself from crime because –read the rest of this sentence closely – that’s the most important reason to own a gun. I took a look at the last 10 podcasts listed on the show’s website, and half dealt primarily with products for self-defense.

Grandpa Gresham, who got the whole family into gun media in the first place, was an outspoken guy who wrote nine books on hunting and fishing and, as far as I can recall, never spoke about using guns for anything other than hunting and sport. And that’s what the gun business was all about before the crazies took over the NRA and invented the stupid and cynical, but ultimately successful marketing strategy known as armed, self-defense. Too bad the legacy of sportsmen like Grits Gresham is disappearing thanks to the efforts of people who bear his name.

Sorry, But The NRA’s Notion Of Gun Safety Just Doesn’t Work.

July 1, 2024

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One of the big changes in the gun debate is the degree to which advocacy organizations like Moms Demand Action and Brady have started moving into the safety space. Shannon et les filles have launched a program called Be Smart, Brady wants to cut gun deaths in half by 2025 with their ASK campaign, suddenly a field that the NRA and the NSSF had all to themselves has attracted a new and vigorous group of gun safety campaigners who have the money and the experience to make their views count.

But if Moms and Brady are going to level the safety playing field, I think they need to really understand what the current gun safety problem is all about. Because both groups seem to be looking at gun safety in a way not much different from how gun safety has been defined and taught by the NRA, and I happen to think that the NRA approach ducks the biggest safety problem of all.

Shannon’s program asks parents to try and keep their guns secure, keep the guns out of the hands of vulnerable people like those suffering from depression, keep the guns locked up or locked away at all times. Brady focuses on one issue, also promoted by Moms, that parents should always ask other parents whether there is an unlocked gun where the kids are going to play. The NRA would never endorse the idea of parents communicating with other parents about guns ownership, but locking guns up or locking them away, what the NRA calls storing guns “so they are not accessible to untrained or unauthorized persons” is a standard M.O. announced in every NRA course.

Keeping guns secure in the home, making sure that kids can’t access guns under any circumstances is all well and good, and don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that Shannon’s gals and the Brady Campaign are now engaged in safety programs as an aspect of their involvement in the gun debate. But all that notwithstanding, I still don’t believe that ‘lock ‘em up, lock ‘em away’ is either sufficient or necessary for responding to the safety risk posed by guns. Because as long as the gun industry and its supporters continue to promote gun ownership primarily as a means of self-defense, by definition you can’t defend yourself with a gun if it’s locked up or locked away.

The problem becomes even more vexing because the 2008 Heller decision, which proclaimed a constitutional right to private ownership of guns, was based on what Scalia called, the “tradition” of keeping a handgun in the home for self-defense. In fact, the Court’s Number One Gun Nut invented this so-called tradition out of whole cloth, unless he really believes that a cynical marketing ploy to compensate for the decline in hunting after the 1980s constitutes some kind of traditional belief. Be that as it may, if you’re going to walk around in the daytime with a concealed weapon and then leave it out on the end-table when you go to sleep at night, you can’t lock it up or lock it away.

And this is where I think Shannon’s ladies and the Brady folks need a message that more clearly distinguishes their notion of safety from the nonsense being peddled by the NRA. And why do I call the NRA safety message nonsense? Here’s a quote from the 2011 edition of Home Firearm Safety, a book the NRA has been selling for twenty-five years: “A gun stored primarily for personal protection must be ready for immediate use. As a general rule, a gun stored for any purpose other than personal protection should never be loaded in the home.” My italics and thanks a lot.

One week after Sandy Hook, Wayne-o belligerently reminded America that a bad guy with a gun could only be stopped by a good guy with a gun. Which means we need a lot of good guys walking around and lying down to sleep with their loaded, unlocked guns. Sorry, but that doesn’t sound all that safe to me.

If Schools Can Teach Safe Sex, Can’t They Teach Safe Guns?

June 16, 2024

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Sooner or later, probably sooner, the number of Americans who die in car crashes each year will be exceeded by the number of Americans who die because someone put a bullet into their brain, or into their chest, or into some other vital part of their anatomy and the most skilled trauma surgeon on call when they are rushed into the ER won’t be able to put them together again. I’m not being sarcastic when I talk about the skill of the trauma surgeon, by the way; gun injuries are much more difficult to treat than any other kind of serious trauma and the costs of gun injury to the medical system are two or three times higher than the costs of any other type of injury.

An interesting commentary on the auto trauma – gun trauma issue was recently posted on Huffington written by a pediatrician, Claire McCarthy, who practices at Boston Children’s Hospital. Dr. McCarthy makes the point that the response to injuries usually involves some kind of safety laws and rules that will limit injuries and therefore reduce risk when the particular product is being used. In this regard she cites the fact that all states have similar licensing requirements for driving, and that all states require seat belts, particularly when kids are in the car. On the other hand, she notes that licensing for gun ownership varies from state to state if it is required at all, and that when new gun laws are proposed, somehow the argument turns into a disagreement about rights, not about safety. The way she puts it, and I love this sentence: “I can’t imagine someone framing motor vehicle safety as a personal freedom issue.”

Dear Dr. McCarthy: Let me be the first one to welcome you to the world of guns. Because in the gun world, particularly the gun world as it has been created and nurtured by the NRA, gun safety has absolutely nothing to do with safety, it only has to do with rights. And your innocence in this regard (obviously intended, not real) is your comment that “we get that cars are dangerous.” Which is exactly the point. For the folks who live in the gun world, guns aren’t dangerous. In fact, the whole reason for owning a gun is that it protects those of us who inhabit the gun world from things that are really dangerous like robbers, and street thugs, and terror cells which are now, according to the NRA, actively operating in every city. What do cars protect us from? Being late to work and getting chewed out by the boss? Big deal. That’s hardly a trade-off. I’ll take the protective value of guns over cars any time.

But seriously Dr. McCarthy, your Huffington op-ed was what we would expect from someone with your background, training and experience. It was literate, informed, rational and based on evidence-driven facts. The only problem is that the folks who really need to be persuaded by your enlightened approach to the problem of gun violence don’t think that way at all. The day after Christmas a young mother was shot to death in a WalMart in Idaho. She wasn’t shot by a robber or a terrorist – she was shot by her two-year old son who reached into her pocketbook and yanked out her loaded gun. Now what in God’s name made this poor woman actually think that she needed to defend herself in a WalMart store? And we’re not talking about some semi-literate living in a trailer park in Tennessee. The victim was a college graduate who worked at the U.S. Department of Energy lab and I’ll bet she made sure to buckle her kid into that safety seat before she drove off to the store.

Public health approaches to injuries - seat belts, window gates, pool fences - have worked again and again. What we need in the case of guns is something much more fundamental. We need education and if schools can teach safe sex and safe eating, why can’t they teach safe guns?

The NRA Better Get It’s Act Together About Gun Safety Or It’s Act Might Close Out Of Town.

May 18, 2024

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Over the past couple of weeks, I have documented the fact that the discussion about gun safety is no longer owned by the NRA and, for the first time, appears to be involving organizations and viewpoints that one could hardly call pro-gun. After all, when groups like the Brady Campaign and Everytown start talking about gun safety, it’s pretty hard to imagine that they share much in common with groups like the NRA. And now we also have a major gun-safety initiative being rolled out by the Ad Council and the National Crime Prevention Council, again hardly folks whose raison d’etre has anything to do with promoting the ownership of guns.

I suspect that the folks sitting down at the NRA headquarters in Fairfax, VA aren’t crazy about the appearance of these organizations onto the gun-safety playing field because until now, they’ve had the safety discussion all to themselves. After all, the NRA was founded in 1871as a firearms training organization by a former Army commander, George Wingate, who lamented the fact that so many of the Union troops who fought in the Civil War came to fight with little or no shooting experience at all. So the NRA comes by its commitment to gun safety honestly, and millions of young men and women have profited from NRA training courses over the last nearly 150 years.

safety2 The problem with the NRA approach to gun safety, however, is that it reflects a mind-set about guns and shooting that is now completely out of date. I joined the NRA in 1955 when I was eleven years old because I wanted to shoot real guns instead of my plastic toys and the NRA sponsored a shooting club that met each week in a shooting range located in the basement of my brother’s junior high. Every Friday we were allowed to take one of the surplus 22-caliber training rifles home to clean it over the weekend, so I walked from the school to my house with the gun wrapped up in a cloth sack and tucked under my arm. Was I living in Topeka, Kansas, or Abilene, Texas, or Fort Pierre, South Dakota? I was actually born, raised and residing in the middle of Washington, D.C. The rifle range was in McFarland Junior High School on Crittenden Street, named after a former Attorney General, and we lived on Hamilton Street, I don’t have to tell you after whom that street was named. I went home with my little rifle by going up Georgia Avenue or 14th Street and it never occurred to me that walking home this way created any issue at all.

In order to join and shoot in the NRA club, I had to learn some basic gun safety rules. And while I don’t remember what the rules actually said, I can tell you that the current safety rules on the NRA website were probably written before I ever shot a gun. According to the NRA, the best way to be safe with a gun is to always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction, always keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot, and always keep the gun unloaded until ready to use. If you want, the NRA will happily send you these rules printed out on a nice piece of cardboard which you can distribute to all your shooting friends.

There’s only one little problem with these safety rules – they were developed long before the NRA started promoting the idea of carrying handguns around for self-defense. And unless the NRA comes up with a new set of safety rules that reflect the new CCW gospel, the NRA will not only find itself sharing the playing field when it comes to gun safety, but being elbowed off to one side. After all, if you’re going to carry a gun for self-defense, how could you imagine only loading it when you’re ready to shoot? That might work at a shooting range, but it’s hardly a prescription for safely carrying a gun in the street.

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