A New Approach To Gun Violence May Make A Big Difference In How We Talk About Guns.

June 24, 2024

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There’s a new gun in town, pardon the pun, when it comes to news about gun violence. It’s called The Trace, and it’s a Bloomberg-backed web informational startup that may turn out to be a very important development in the ongoing debate about guns. It’s not a blog and thank God doesn’t let readers post their comments after each story so what we get is a combination of content from various media outlets plus in-depth reportage from Trace writers themselves. In other words, it’s a real online newspaper entirely devoted to the question of what to do about guns.

trace Well, not so much what to do about guns, but what to do about gun violence. Which is what distinguishes it somewhat from the NRA media outlets which never mention ‘guns’ and ‘violence’ in the same sentence because guns don’t have anything to do with violence at all. That guns account for 30,000 deaths and 60,000 injuries each year – that’s just a figment of the Bloomberg imagination. And the number of gun violence incidents that is updated (and undercounted) every day on the front page of The Trace? A small price to pay for those millions of crimes that are prevented by all those armed citizens patrolling their homes and streets with guns. Like the way George Zimmerman was patrolling his street, remember?

Anyway, the point is that this new venture not only injects some reality into the gun debate (boy, are the gun nuts going to whack me around about that one) but, as far as I know, it’s the only media outlet whose entire focus is on gun violence and, what gives it real strength, is that the content is not dependent on the usual snip-snip from other online sources, because in addition to links here and there, you can read original stories by experienced journalists like Alex Yablon and Jennifer Mascia, both of whom have covered gun issues for such small-time outfits as New York Magazine and The New York Times.

In an interview, one of the site’s financial backers stated that the online publication would aim at winning a Pulitzer. I like that approach for two reasons. First, it’s refreshing that anyone would set their sights so high, given the schlock that usually passes for information in the gun world. More important, this venture may be able to do what nobody else seems inclined to do when it comes to guns, namely, to reach beyond the ranks of the most committed pro-gun or anti-gun activists and engage the wider audience in the debate about gun violence. If The Trace becomes known as a source for original, first-class writing, it will attract a readership that, generally speaking, wouldn’t otherwise be interested in anything having to do with guns. And those are the people who can and should play a much more informed and active role in this state of affairs.

The second reason I like this new effort is that Pulitzer-level reporting not only requires an attention to detail and honesty bolstered by facts, but also demands that the story-line embraces the whole informational spectrum, no matter whose precious ox gets gored. In this respect, the staff of The Trace may find themselves on occasion having to deliver critical, rather than informational reports on activities carried out by the gun-sense side, but that will only increase their credibility with the non-affiliated audience that the gun debate needs to attract.

I went to my first anti-war demonstration in 1964, but it wasn’t until 1972 that everyone agreed that we were fighting the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. And this happened because Frances Fitzgerald published a story, “Fire In The Lake,” in The New Yorker Magazine, which then became a best-selling book. The book won a Pulitzer and all of a sudden everyone was talking about nothing other than Viet Nam. It could happen again around the issue of gun violence and it could happen again because someone publishes exactly the right story in The Trace. Ultimately, words are much more powerful than bullets or guns.

The New York Times Thinks The NRA Has Won. I’m Not So Sure.

April 24, 2024

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It’s official. The NRA has won the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people. The victory has been announced by none other than The New York Times in an editorial from Charles Blow, reporting on a report from Pew Research, which shows that more Americans favor “gun rights” than favor “gun control.” The margin is narrow, 52 to 46, but in surveys conducted since 1993, the gun-control folks held a substantial lead over the pro-gun gang in every poll. Now for the first time, the positions have “flipped,” leading Blow to announce that “The NRA appears to be winning this round.”

Not surprisingly, this opinion piece caught the attention of the gun-sense community, and not in a particularly positive way. After all, the Times has published numerous editorials calling for stricter gun licensing, and the paper went out of its way to highlight the news that none of the guns displayed at the recent NRA show in Nashville could actually be made to shoot. Want to get someone on the pro-gun side to quickly lose his cool? Mention Mike Bloomberg or The New York Times. Take your pick.

nyt logo After announcing the results of the Pew survey, Blow gave his best guess as to why public opinion appears to be favoring less gun control. I’m being polite by characterizing Blow’s explanations as being a ‘best guess.’ The truth is that nobody really knows whether anyone who is asked a question about something as politically insignificant as guns has spent more than two seconds thinking about the issue before they picked up the phone. Guns only register as an important issue in polls that are conducted immediately after a high-profile shooting (Gabby Giffords, Sandy Hook), and with all due respect to Mr. Blow, I have never been convinced that we should take public opinion all that seriously about an issue whose significance rises and falls following random events.

Be that as it may, I want to offer a counter-argument to the Times and Charles Blow, and I want to make it clear that neither am I looking for some kind of silver lining in what otherwise might be seen from the gun-sense side as a depressing state of affairs, nor am I suggesting that the survey question no longer captures a valid view of what the gun argument is all about. Because no matter what people who want to see an end to gun violence might think, changing public policy on gun ownership means making changes in the law. And even if the laws are only changed to make it more difficult for guns to get into the ‘wrong hands,’ (e.g., domestic abusers, violent misdemeanors), this still means extending the reach of government as to whom should be able to own guns. If that doesn’t qualify as new or additional controls, no matter how you dress it up, then perhaps I need a refresher course in English 101.

One thing I do know is that the mortality and morbidity resulting from the use of guns amounts to more than 100,000 Americans every year. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s intentional or unintentional, whether it’s self-inflicted or inflicted by someone else, the one thing that all this mortality and morbidity shares is that it involved a gun. And the other thing we know is that changing anything that results in this kind of behavior takes a very long time. Tobacco was proven harmful fifty years before warnings appeared on cigarette packs.

Widespread advocacy about gun violence is really only twenty years old. And let’s not forget that the survey used by Charles Blow was actually conducted and published last December, with public opinion about all progressive issues in the doldrums after the mid-term election results of 2014. The fact that the NRA continues to marginalize and sensationalize its own message is not symptomatic of strength, but of a failure to attract new demographics (women, minorities, etc.) to its fold. I wouldn’t be so quick to move the NRA into the winner’s circle. Not just yet.

 

There’s Plenty Of Gun Research That We Can Do Without Anyone Losing Their Guns

June 18, 2024

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The New York Times just called for a resumption of public health research on guns, noting that Congressman Jack Kingston (R-GA), whose sub-committee holds the research purse-strings, continues to oppose such funding for the CDC. Kingston, like many members of the GOP, has been facing political opposition from the right and now, while running for the Senate, is facing some serious problems about the source of some campaign cash, so the last thing he’s about to stack more problems on his plate, particularly any backlash from the NRA. But I think there may be a way to package gun research that would meet the current agendas of both sides, and move beyond the name-calling and vitriol that erupts whenever gun issues are the subject of public debate.

U.S. Rep Jack Kingston

For example, let’s look at the question of mental illness and guns. The NRA believes that we need to “fix” the mental health system in order to keep guns out of the wrong hands. They are never very specific about what such a fix would entail, as long as it doesn’t in any way impede the ability of “normal” folks to acquire or use guns. The gun control side will tell you that serious mental illness is not really linked to violent behavior, which means we don’t need to control the people, we need to control the guns.

Here is where some more research needs to be done that really shouldn’t upset either side. For example, more than 50% of all suicides in the United States are committed with guns, a percentage that climbs to 80% among suicide victims above the age of 65. Back in 1992, Arthur Kellerman led a team that did some research which appeared to indicate that people who lived in homes with firearms had a higher rate of suicide than people who residences were gun-free. But Kellerman only counted suicides that took place in the home, whereas people who committed suicide away from their homes also had an elevated suicide rate if they used a gun. Wouldn’t it be helpful to conduct a study of gun suicides outside the home to see when and where the gun was used? Wouldn’t such a study help us to better understand the degree to which the immediate impulse to commit suicide is helped or not by access to a gun?

Here’s another example. Garen Wintemute recently published some data which showed that in California, felons who pleaded down to a misdemeanor which still allowed them to purchase a gun had a much higher rate of gun violence subsequent to their conviction than people whose sentence kept them in a prohibited category and thus unable to legally acquire a gun. The NRA keeps talking about the fact that gun violence is only committed by bad guys with guns. But if someone were to extend Wintemute’s findings to a representative sample for the country as a whole, couldn’t such research then be used to revise the category of prohibited persons for gun ownership not to just include felons but to include persons convicted of certain misdemeanors as well?

I’m not a public health scholar, but it seems to me that just within the two examples cited above, there’s plenty of research to do. And it’s research that would in no way negatively impact the 2nd Amendment rights of anyone to own or acquire a gun. If the House Committee chaired by Congressman Kingston can tell the CDC what kind of research they can’t fund, there’s no reason why they can’t tell them what they should try to fund. Unless, of course, the real agenda is to keep evidence-based discussions outside the purview of guns, because just yelling back and forth is a guarantee that nothing will ever get done.

When Is A Homicide Always A Homicide? Try Using A Gun.

May 6, 2024

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One area in which behavior that results in serious medical conditions has remained largely outside the purview of public health regulation and research concerns injuries caused by accidents with guns. Most gun injuries that result in deaths aren’t accidents. They were caused by people who consciously decided to use a gun on themselves or someone else. Together. suicides and homicides account for 98% of annual gun deaths; accidental or unintentional deaths account for only 2% of the total. At least this is what the numbers look like that are published by the CDC. In 2010, the last year for which we have complete numbers, gun suicides were 19,392, gun homicides were 11,078 and unintentional gun deaths were 606; the last number, as Ralph Cramden used to say on The Honeymooners, a mere “bag of shells.”

But now we have a very different argument being made by Michael Luo and Mike McIntire of the New York Times, who believe that the way in which coroners and other public health officials treat and report fatal gun injuries seriously undercounts the number of accidental gun deaths that occur each year. In their article, published last September, the reporters dug into specific, coroner-level gun death reports in four different states and discovered that as many as half of the gun mortalities that were reported as homicides were, in fact, unintentional or accidental, a finding which if true for the entire country, would make a substantial difference in the ratio of homicides to accidents and might undercut a major argument on gun safety promoted by the gun industry and the NRA.

Why is there such a discrepancy in how gun deaths occur as opposed to how they are reported? Because in many states and localities, any shooting of one person by another, regardless of age, is considered a homicide. Or sometimes the same office will rule one accidental shooting as a homicide and the next one as an accident. Luo and McIntire give examples of both, including a “homicide” in Texas where a 9-month-old was killed when his two-year-old brother opened a dresser drawer next to the crib, pulled out a gun and banged away. Now I can’t imagine that even in Texas they could figure out how to execute a two-year-old for murder, but I also suspect that the parents weren’t charged with neglect, or abuse, or anything else. Texas, along with a majority of other states, has no law requiring that guns be locked or locked away in the home, remember?

childsafeOf course if you listen to the NRA touting it’s Eddie Eagle program or the NSSF promoting its ChildSafe safety kits, you would think that the entire decline in unintentional gun injuries was due to them. And in fact there has been a decline in accidental gun deaths over the last decade, from 726 in 2000 to 606 in 2010 (although the rate of gun injuries over the same period has gone up.) But the question that emerges from Luo and McIntire’s reportage is whether the morbidity data that the gun industry uses to pat itself on the back for its safety initiatives really tells us whether gun owners are being safe, or whether coroners and other medical workers are just playing fast and loose with different definitions of how gun accidents really occur?

These issues might be resolved and we could finally understand the true degree to which Americans suffer from unwise use of guns if politicians like Rand Paul would stop pandering to the NRA faithful and withdraw their cynical opposition to guns and public health. I don’t blame the NRA for trying to hold the line against physicians or anyone else who might seek to limit or regulate the market for guns. After all, they represent the gun industry, and when was the last time that any industry came out in favor of government controls? But it’s nothing short of disgraceful when a politician who also happens to be a licensed physician could pretend that public health should play no role in how Americans use their guns. Note: I didn’t say that public health should make the rules. But public health should be able to explain gun accidents when there are no rules at all.

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