Want To Build An Effective GVP Campaign? Don’t Talk About It - Sell It.

April 1, 2024

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A few years ago I was at a gun show in York, PA, a farm town about 60 miles west of Philadelphia. Talk about a gun show ‘loophole,’ the entire show was a loophole because all the 200 or so tables were taken by guys who proudly displayed their junky, old guns along with other slightly rusted bric-a-brac. But I can tell you there wasn’t a single person walking around the armory who had the slightest intention of doing anything illegal with a gun.

About a week before the show, Pennsylvania had changed its CCW law, moving from being a discretionary, ‘may issue’ to a non-discretionary ‘shall issue’ state. The Sheriff in York was so inundated by applicants that he had to bring in additional help. I happened to be standing next to a guy who had just come from the Sheriff and was being interviewed by a reporter from Philadelphia who heard about the long delays and came out to see what was up. The interview went as follows:

Reporter: How long did you have to wait to get processed?

Gun Guy: Oh, three or four hours. Was a mess.

Reporter: Why do you want a concealed-carry license?

Gun Guy: Well, I’m worried about all the crime around here.

Reporter: You know, I checked before coming out and York hasn’t had a serious crime in the last two years.

Gun Guy: Yea, but they’ll come out from Philadelphia.

Now leaving aside the identification of the “they’ from Philadelphia, the bottom line is that the gentleman who waited for hours to apply for CCW did it for God knows what reason, but when he was asked to explain his behavior to a reporter (representing the ‘main-stream’ media no less) he fell back on the same rationale for CCW that Gun Nation has been promoting for the last thirty years. And a majority of Americans who are asked why they own guns and whether guns make them safer buy that same argument, hook, line and sinker. It turns out, of course, that most legal gun owners tend to live in low-crime areas and the number of people who actually use guns to defend themselves from criminal attacks are an infinitesimally tiny proportion of the population who claim that the benefit of gun ownership outweighs the risk.

So why do so many Americans believe a story about guns that runs contrary to what gun violence research shows again and again to be true? Because to the extent that people who own guns spend any time thinking about why they own guns beyond the fact that they enjoy owning and playing around with guns, they are going to repeat what they hear, and what they hear is what the NRA tells them again and again.

I am a member both of the NRA and the AARP. I get three times as much mail and emails from the NRA as I get from AARP. And the NRA makes me feel special and unique because I own guns. The only thing that makes me special to the AARP is that I have lived past their minimum membership age. And the idea that guns are a risk? Hell, I never shot myself or anyone else.

The problem faced by the GVP community is that, like it or not, most of their proposals for reducing gun violence are sensible and realistic, but they still require me to change my behavior in some way or another in order to enjoy my guns. And frankly, I don’t want to be told about changing my behavior by someone who doesn’t own guns. Why should I change my behavior? I haven’t done anything wrong with my guns.

The GVP uses evidence-based research to compete against a slick marketing campaign. Maybe they should take on the NRA by selling, not just explaining their message. You think an outfit like Saatchi & Saatchi couldn’t take forty million from Mayor Mike and figure out how to change hearts and minds?

With Friends Like Salon, The GVP Community May Not Need Enemies.

March 1, 2024

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I must be getting old and cranky, but the truth is that I really just don’t find some of the GVP blogging worthwhile or even remotely based on facts. And I know that everyone deserves a chance to say whatever they want to say and write whatever they want to write, but the shabbiness of some of the arguments leaves me feeling dismayed at best, really pissed-off at worst.

And as regards a piece that just appeared in Salon, I’m really pissed off for two reasons. First, Salon has a good track record for publishing and republishing solid commentary on gun violence. Which means they have a pretty good idea about how the gun violence argument should be framed. And this takes me to the second reason, namely, that last week’s editorial entitled ‘The Gun Industry Won,’ is an unmitigated piece of journalistic junk which bears no relationship to reality at all. It’s not only wrong – it’s completely and totally wrong and I wouldn’t respond if it had been published by the NRA or the NSSF. But it was published by our friends at Salon, and like I say in my title, with friends like that the GVP community doesn’t need enemies.

The author, Amanda Marcotte, begins her piece by noting that news coverage of mass shootings is “paltry, the opinion pieces will be even thinner.” That’s something new? Let me break the news to you gently, Amanda. The reason that Sandy Hook was a front-page story for weeks was because it took place within a quick back-and-forth ride to New York. Six months’ earlier, James Holmes killed and wounded 82 people in a Colorado movie theater, Obama and Romney cancelled their campaign events that evening, the next day the President made some televised remarks, and that was that. Wonderful.

In 2014, the Ebola epidemic claimed 11,000 people in Central Africa. When two Ebola cases were discovered in the US, the resultant hysteria, largely promoted by uninformed media channels, went far beyond any fears that erupted after the Lehmann Brothers bankruptcy during the financial meltdown in 2008. Meanwhile, gun homicides alone kill more than 11,000 Americans every year, never mind the 20,000+ gun suicides, the 1,000+ unintentional gun deaths, etc. Does this situation ever get reported by the media? Not before Sandy Hook, and not after Sandy Hook. What Amanda Marcotte calls the “learned helplessness” of the media has characterized the media response to gun violence long before she ever wrote anything about guns, or about anything else, for that matter.

Of course her real ‘proof’ of the NRA victory is the slavish support for the 2nd Amendment on the part of every Republican running for the party’s Presidential nomination. But in the entire paragraph which bemoans the red-meat, pro-gun rhetoric of the GOP, Amanda conveniently forgets to mention that this year’s election may turn out to be a national referendum on gun violence, thanks to the uncompromising stand of Hillary, who has departed from her husband’s oft-stated warning that the Democrats better not try to take on the NRA.

Don’t get me wrong. The fact that someone’s sympathies lie with the GVP doesn’t mean that honest concerns about the shape and direction of GVP activities shouldn’t be raised. But the GVP movement is light years ahead of where it was five years ago. And ten years ago, with the exception of several inside-the-beltway lobbying groups, to all intents and purposes the GVP community didn’t exist. Amanda says the problem lies in the fact that Gun Nation uses the same political rhetoric and strategies employed to weaken concern about other social issues like climate change and reproductive rights.

To which my answer is: So what? If one-third of all households still own guns, why should we be surprised that Americans believe that a gun can protect you from crime? But remember this Amanda: After seven years of gun-buying mania, the number of Americans owning guns continue to go down. And you consider this to be a victory for the NRA?

How Violent Is Gun Violence? More Than You Think.

February 7, 2024

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One of the continuing debates within the GVP community is how to define ‘gun violence.’ On the one hand there are the obvious categories: homicide, assault and robbery with a gun. Then there is suicide with a gun, which results in death but is certainly a different sort of violence than what happens when a gun is used in a criminal act. And of course we also differentiate between intentional, as opposed to unintentional acts of gun violence; indeed, the latter may not actually be gun violence, even though someone still ends up being injured by a gun.

conference-program-pic Incidentally, outside the GVP, gun violence doesn’t exist. As far as I know, the NRA and the NSSF have never used the term ‘gun violence’ in anything they have ever said about guns. The various pro-gun noisemakers (Emily Miller, Dana Loesch, every Republican Presidential candidate, et. al.) prattle on about violent ‘thugs’ who use guns, but it’s people who kill people, remember? It’s got nothing to do with the gun. Now back to reality.

Adding up all the categories above, the national gun violence toll in 2013 was 117,894. At least this is the number published by the CDC. By the agency’s own admission, this number is understated. Why? Because when we count nonfatal injuries, any kind of injury, we are estimating the actual number based on reporting from a ‘representative’ group of emergency medical facilities, and sometimes the estimations are close to reality and sometimes they are not. So the death toll is close to accurate but the injury numbers may or may not be exact. And this is a serious gap in what we know about gun violence because gun injuries are more likely to be significantly more serious than any other type of injury, unless you fall out of a fifth-story window and somehow manage to survive.

My friends at the Gun Violence Archive, by the way, have gun morality numbers which match up pretty close to the CDC. In 2014 the CDC found 12,265 gun deaths from every type of shooting except suicides. The GVA number for 2014 was 12,585. Obviously, the GVA calculation for non-fatal gun injuries is far below the number recorded by the CDC, because most shootings that don’t result in a death aren’t newsworthy enough to get media mention, which is the basic source of information used by the GVA.

Which brings me to the point of this commentary, namely, the fact that by focusing on gun deaths, as opposed to overall injuries, the main issue of gun violence is obscured, if not altogether lost. The gun violence issue is driven by homicides, particularly when a mass shooting occurs. But in terms of how many people are seriously affected by shootings, gun mortality is the tip of the iceberg, and we need to understand the totality of the problem if we are going to map mitigating strategies that will really work.

There’s a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Bedford-Stuyvesant, a.k.a., ‘Bed-Stuy, Do or Die.’ Like many Brooklyn neighborhoods, it’s beginning to experience a degree of gentrification, but the area around Fulton and Atlantic Avenues is still the Wild West. So far this year the neighborhood has experienced 2 murders, which if the carnage continues, the yearly homicide rate per 100,000 will top 20. But the total number of shooting victims is now 6, which will yield an annual gun violence rate of 60; further down Atlantic Avenue in East New York the GV rate could top 140 by end of year.

Numbers like this don’t describe an ‘epidemic’ of gun violence. Frankly, I don’t know whether we have invented terminology which accurately describes this state of affairs. But there are neighborhoods all over the United States which experience gun violence at levels equal or above to what goes on in Bed-Stuy; higher even than the violence experienced in Honduras or the Ivory Coast. I’m not even sure that a word like ‘violence’ describes what is really going on.

 

 

 

 

Does Knowledge About Guns Laws Promote More Gun Laws? Maybe Yes, Maybe No.

February 5, 2024

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A new study conducted by researchers at Yale University and covered in The Trace appears to confirm a truism in how people develop and hold opinions, namely, the more you want to believe in something, the more you can make yourself believe in something. In this case, the issue is guns, and what two Yale researchers discovered in a survey of 1,384 people, is that people who support stronger gun-control laws also know that background checks are not conducted on all gun transfers, whereas people who are less inclined to support less gun-control laws believe that universal background checks are already in place. In other words, if you believe there is a gun “problem” and you further believe that new laws could help solve the problem, you will be in favor of more laws. And to quote an old Spanish saying: If not, not.

I have two issues with this survey, but I want it understood that I am not trying to throw out the baby with the bathwater; I’m just trying to make the bathwater a bit more warm. To begin, I am always somewhat suspect of public surveys about guns if the survey purports to reflect the views of a ‘representative’ group of Americans without distinguishing whether this particular group includes gun owners or not. Because on any issue related to guns, these folks are going to have plenty to say, particularly if they happen to be among the minority if gun owners who really do ‘cling’ to their guns because it’s a lifestyle and a hobby that is very important to them. They are not necessarily the majority of gun owners and it certainly isn’t a majority of Americans, but it may be a majority in certain gun-rich states and it’s for sure just about everyone who turns out when a new gun law comes up for debate.

In this respect the Yale researchers ask the following question: “Could it be that public misperceptions of existing gun control laws also contribute to the absence of public mobilization for new legislation?” Let me break it gently to our GVP colleagues from Yale – the folks who are against new gun laws never have any trouble mobilizing for a public debate, whether they know anything about the law in question or not. It’s the 89% of respondents to this survey who both know there are no universal background checks and want an expansion of gun-control laws who usually don’t show up.

The authors focused this survey on questions about background checks because, according to them, “universal background checks for gun purchases could substantially reduce the number of gun-related deaths in the USA.” They cite two well-known studies to bolster this statement, but that’s not what either study actually says. The research by Eric Fleelger and his group correlates gun fatalities with the presence or absence of gun laws in every state, but background checks are just one of 17 different legal procedures that are used to monitor public traffic of guns. As for the study by Daniel Webster, et. al., on the effect of the repeal of Missouri’s handgun-purchase law, a permit-to-purchase procedure conducted at the state level is, by definition, a much more rigorous method for weeding out unqualified handgun purchasers than a 60-second conversation between a gun shop owner and an FBI staffer at NICS.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying or implying that the problem of gun violence can be effectively addressed without additional laws. I am also not saying that researching the effect of gun-control laws with an eye towards making those laws more effective shouldn’t be done. But what I am saying is that if we believe in public policy as a mechanism for change, then the question we really have to ask is not whether folks understand the ins and outs of specific policies, but whether they are willing to come out and show themselves when a public policy is being addressed. Perhaps that’s the question which should have been asked.

 

Want A New AR Rifle? Don’t Buy A New Gun, Just Buy A New Part.

February 4, 2024

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One of highlights of the gun business is going to the SHOT Show each year and looking at new products. The gun industry is awash each year in new products for the simple reason that gun makers have to find ways to sell more guns to the same consumers, even if these same consumers already own more guns than they really need to own. Actually, the last time the gun industry changed the basic design of any product was when Gaston Glock substituted a striker for a hammer and stuck it inside a polymer frame. Otherwise, all the various doo-dads that you find on guns may change the look, the finish or the feel, but a gun is still a gun.

ar This may not be the case with a new product from an AR custom shop out of Nevada, Franklin Armory, that specializes cobbling together various components to create various different styles of black guns. And while a gun is a gun is a gun, this time around the folks at Franklin Armory appear to have come up with not just a new type of AR rifle, but a new technology design which differs very significantly from the traditional way in which assault rifles actually work.

It’s called a binary-trigger system, which means that you don’t just get off a shot every time you pull the trigger, you also get off a shot by letting the trigger snap back to its standard firing position rather than waiting for the trigger to snap back to the firing position while the bolt slams shut and then pulling it again. In other words, because the firing mechanism is activated by the trigger moving in either direction, you are getting 2 shots even though you are only pulling the trigger once.

The company has sent relevant engineering and design documentation to the ATF, and while they haven’t gotten an official ‘yes’ as regards this new design, they also haven’t received a ‘no.’ The ATF test lab is the last word on whether any gun can be sold in the United States, which means that right now there’s a teeny chance that all guns sold with this firing system will have to be recalled, but I wouldn’t bet the barn that this would happen anytime soon.

You can catch a discussion about this new firing technology on a video posted on the Guns America website following SHOT. You can also see the BFS system in actual use by going to the recoil.com website linked above. In the interests of full disclosure, I have not personally tested the Binary Firing System myself. But if it performs the way it appears in the videos I have watched, there may be a real change in assault-rifle technology looming ahead.

The AR-style platform is popular because of its modular design, which means you can pull out just about any part of the gun and replace it with another, similar part of your own choice. It’s the ability of gun owners, particularly younger owners, to customize virtually every piece of the AR which makes the gun so popular because you don’t have to buy a new gun to get a new product, all you have to do is buy a new part. And if or when Franklin Armory gets the official go-ahead from the ATF, I’ll guarantee they will start selling this BFS module to any AR owner who wants to use it with their own gun.

Now here’s the problem for my friends in GVP. Because of the way the binary trigger works, a gun with this system delivers shots faster than the standard AR. It’s not a full-auto gun, but you are basically shooting semi-auto mode twice as quickly as when the trigger has to be pulled for every shot. If I need to spell out the implications of this technology to anyone who is concerned about the lethality of an AR, I suggest you go back and read this column again.

 

What The Gun Violence Numbers Tell Us And What They Don’t Tell Us.

January 11, 2025

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This is the first time in my lifetime (and I was born during World War II), that a President has used the bully pulpit to focus on the issue of gun violence. He’s issued executive orders, he’s held a Town Hall meeting, written an op-ed for The New York Times, and for sure will have plenty more to say when Congress and the American people gather to hear his State of the Union speech. So in preparation for that event, as well as in response to the veritable torrent of media content that has been flying around the last week, I thought I would publish the data on gun violence that should be used to evaluate what Obama and others are saying about the issue itself.

morbidity2

Here are the yearly numbers on gun mortality from the CDC. Note that gun suicides dropped between 1993 and 2000, then were fairly level until 2008, and then have moved upwards again at a fairly rapid rate. Gun homicides also declined substantially between 1993 and 2000, and have remained somewhere between 10,000 and 11,000 over the last thirteen years.

There’s only one little problem with these numbers – they hide as much as they show. In fact, notwithstanding the increase since 2008, gun suicides as a percentage of all suicides have declined to slightly less than 50%, the lowest percentage since these numbers were first tracked by the CDC. As for gun homicides, while there was a significant decline until 2000, the number has stayed stubbornly at that level ever since, with minimal variations between this year and that.

On the other hand, the homicide number is a total of both intentional and unintentional gun deaths, and if we break out the latter, we find a remarkable trend over the last 20+ years, namely, that unintentional gun deaths have dropped from 1,521 in 1993 to 586 in 2014, a decline of nearly two-thirds. Or to look at it another way, when intentional gun deaths dropped by 36% between 1993 and 2000, accidental gun deaths declined by more than 50% during the same period.

The decline in intentional gun homicides after the mid-90s paralleled an overall decline in violent crime and is presumed to be a factor of that latter trend. But while theories abound as to why violence in general and gun violence in particular decreased so dramatically until the early 2000s, I don’t notice anyone talking about the even greater drop in unintentional gun deaths over those years. And while the intentional death toll from guns has of late levelled off, unintentional gun deaths continue to decline, from 802 in 2001 to 586 last year.

In a New York Times op-ed debate about gun safety, Steve Teret pulls out a 2003 study conducted by some of his Johns Hopkins colleagues which indicates that smart gun technology, if available on all currently-owned firearms, might save upwards of 37% of the people who are killed by accidental shootings each year. That’s an impressive number, and even if it’s slightly overblown (because God knows how long it would take before smart guns are actually purchased by consumers), there’s no question that keeping guns away from kids and other unqualified folks would cut the accidental death toll to some extent.

But rather than trying to come up with a vague number that might or might not represent the saving in human lives from smart-gun technologies, why don’t public health researchers try to figure out the reasons for a two-thirds decline in accidental gun deaths over the last two decades? One answer I won’t accept is that the decline in gun accidents is due to the NRA or NSSF safety campaigns, for the simple reason that neither has ever been evaluated in honest, no-nonsense terms. But until a GVP-minded researcher tries to figure out why accidental gun mortality keeps going down, we are forced to sit back and wait for smart guns to hit the shelves. And wait.

 

What Matters Is Not What He Says, It’s That Obama Says Something About Guns.

January 4, 2025

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The big news this week is the looming possibility that the Bomber will make good on his promise (or threat, depending on how you look at it) to issue an Executive Order on gun control, and already the Gun Nation is gearing up for the fight. Trump has announced he will “veto” these orders (someone might want to give Trump the Shlump a quick lesson on Constitutional law), Christie has jumped on the Obama the Dictator bandwagon, and never to be outdone by any candidate’s attempt at gross stupidity, Rand Paul is drawing up legislation to block the President from issuing any Executive Orders about guns.

 

Best gun salesman ever!

I don’t know exactly what the President is planning to do, but he appears to be getting ready to say something on this issue during his State of the Union speech next week. The President talked about gun regulations during his 2013 State of the Union speech, but these remarks were delivered less than two months after Sandy Hook. There was no mention of gun control in his 2014 remarks, nor last year. Now the issue if gun violence is back on the front burner, and it appears that he will try to do something about extending background checks by coming up with a more precise definition of what it means to be a dealer in guns.

As regards the current definition, I’m quoting from the relevant Federal code: “any person engaged in the business of selling firearms at wholesale or retail,” which is about as precise as the Man in the Moon. The problem here is not figuring out what constitutes a firearm, but what the phrase “in the business” really means. Part of the problem is the fact that guns, unlike most consumer items, don’t for the most part wear out, so acquiring and then re-selling them is part and parcel of what most gun enthusiasts like to do. And despite the fact that private, non-NICS gun transactions are considered anathema by the GVP crowd, selling a gun to or through a dealer instead of directly to another individual means that the seller gives up a chunk of dough either because the dealer wants to make a profit in the re-sale or the buyer will have to pay the dealer to conduct the NICS background check.

The real problem is that the average gun owner, and most gun owners are, in fact, very law abiding (otherwise they really can’t own guns) and doesn’t believe there’s any connection between the way he transfers a gun and the gun violence that kills and injures more than 100,000 Americans every year. I happen to live outside of Springfield, MA, whose gun homicide rate last year was somewhere around 15 per 100,000, about five times the national rate. Less than two miles from the neighborhood where half these murders occurred is a fairground where a big gun show is held four times a year. If you walked up to anyone at this show and told him that the private sale he had just completed might result in another gun murder across town, he’d stare at you in disbelief.

I don’t think that folks who support the extension of background checks need to justify this policy by trying to prove that reducing private gun transfers will, ipso facto, bring the rate of gun violence down. I also don’t think they need to fall back on the judgement of legal scholars (not that the judgement hurts) to support the President if he decides that this is what he wants to do.

I have been saying for the last three years that when it comes to the argument about gun violence, I simply want a fair fight using evidence-based data as opposed to promoting gun ownership out of fear. It doesn’t matter whether extended background checks will reduce mass killings or gun killings overall. What matters is that we have a serious and honest discussion about gun violence and a State of the Union address is the perfect place to begin.

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