Colion Noir Is Having Trouble Finding People Who Like Guns.

September 24, 2024

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I don’t usually give the pro-gun gang free publicity, but I think that everyone who is concerned about reducing gun violence should take out 15 minutes and look at the recently-posted NRA video with Colion Noir. Nobody would pay Colion much attention if it weren’t for the fact that he’s such an atypical gun owner that he gets noticed no matter what he says or does. He’s Black, hip, cool, a real dude in Armani clothing who talks the talk and walks the walk, the talk being how much funs it is to be into guns. And in particular he talks up the whole issue of armed, self-defense which has become the rallying-cry for the surge in gun sales over the last few years.

Actually, the real reason why gun sales have nearly doubled in the last few years has to do with one thing and one thing only, namely, the Kenyan, or the Muslim, or whatever Donald Trump thinks the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue happens to be. And if someone like Trump or any other red-meat Presidential pretender moves into the People’s House in 2017, I guarantee you that gun sales will fall back down to where they were under George W. Bush, 9-11 or no 9-11.

All the more reason why the gun industry is trying to convince everyone that a gun is the best protection against crime. But there’s only one little problem. Violent crime keeps going down. Or at least it keeps going down in neighborhoods where most gun owners happen to live. Because most gun owners are married, White men who live in smaller cities or rural areas, and these are locations that, generally speaking, don’t experience a lot of crime.

Enter Colion with this video attempt to make gun owning to the demographics that don’t seem particularly interested in buying guns: racial minorities, urbanites, women and millennial men. He’s got them all in this video; more than twenty people appear and most actually have something to say. The only problem is that by the end of the production, you really understand what the industry will be up against when the current White House tenant moves back to Illinois.

The video begins with a very realistic and forbiddingly well-done scene in which a young woman screams her head off because someone has just broken down her door. We then segue to a series of discussions between Colion and passerbys on a Houston street, some conversation snips between him, this guy and that guy, a stupidly-banal verbal exchange between Colion and four old high school friends, the requisite appearance of two hip-looking lesbians, and a final, philosophically-concerned exchange between Colion and his female friend, Ja-Mes Sloan.

In this final scene Colion gives the whole thing away because in responding to the doubts about gun ownership voiced by Ms. Sloan, here’s what Colion has to say: “I have the right to defend myself however I choose to defend myself.” He’s a lawyer and he said that? He has the ‘right’ to decide for himself what kind of a weapon he’s going to use? Even gun-nut Antonin Scalia said in Heller that the government can regulate and even outlaw weapons considered too dangerous for civilian use.

But maybe what we’re looking at in this video is Colion’s own attempt at cinema verité because if I were Colion, I’d be pissed off and frustrated by the time I got done speaking with all these old and new-found friends. And the reason I might feel that way is that not one single person says that he or she would ever want to own a gun – not one! In fact, the only person who expressed an interest in self-defense said she would rather get herself a dog. So here we have a video produced by the NRA which starts out with a home invasion but then says that when push comes to shove, most Americans would rather trust Man’s Best Friend, and that friend isn’t a gun.

 

You Can Regulate Guns All You Want, But It’s Still The Gun Stupid, It’s The Gun.

September 24, 2024

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Yesterday I drove up to Vermont, met a guy in a parking lot and bought a Remington 1100 shotgun from him for four hundred bucks. It’s a beautiful gun, 20-gauge, left-handed ejection since I’m right-handed but left-eye dominant, just what I’ve been looking to add to my personal collection of guns. Vermont has no state gun law so we didn’t have to bother with a background check but now that I’m back in my home state of Massachusetts I’m supposed to go on a state website and register the gun. Am I going to bother? Like I’m going on a diet, that’s how I’m going to bother.

If Vermont had passed the gun bill they debated this year and had that bill included a background-check requirement for all gun sales, I can guarantee you that I would still have the Remington 1100 in the trunk of my car and Ted (I think that was his name) would still have my four hundred bucks. The truth is that I need that Remington 1100 like I need a hole in my head, but yesterday was a beautiful Fall day, the leaves are beginning to turn, take a ride, fool around, buy a gun.

For all the nonsense about we need guns to defend ourselves from crime, from ISIS, from Obama, from whatever, the truth is that 99% of all the guns that go across the gun shop counter for the first time go into the hands of people who not only don’t need that gun for any earthly reason, but really don’t have the faintest idea why they just bought another gun. And the reason I say ‘another’ gun is that the number of guns that are sold keeps going up and the number of gun owners keeps going down. Which means that fewer and fewer people own more and more guns. Right now roughly 40 million households contain some 300 million guns. If current trends continue another ten years, roughly 30 million households will hold 350 million guns. In other words, the average gun-owning family will own more than 10 guns. And if someone wants to explain how owning so many guns is anything other than an impulsive form of behavior, I’m all ears. Right now my personal gun collection numbers 41 or 42, and believe me when I tell you that I’m at the low end of the totem pole when it comes to owning lots of guns.

The problem is that when you have 350 million guns out there, it’s simply not possible to keep a bunch of them out of the ‘wrong hands.’ I don’t care how many background checks are run, how many mental-health databases are sent to NICS, how many times every gun owner tries to remember to lock up all his guns. If 300,000 guns are stolen each year, that number isn’t going down if the number of personally-owned guns goes up. Particularly when breaking into a gun owner’s home increasingly means there will be a pile of guns, not just one or two.

Regulating any product means making it more difficult for people to get their hands on the regulated item, which is why states with more gun regulations also tend to be states with fewer guns. The problem, of course, is that the ownership-regulation equation can also be reversed; states with fewer gun owners have more regulations because there aren’t enough gun owners to stop gun laws from being passed.

If you’re concerned about reducing gun violence, then of course you’ll support common-sense, workable laws that keep guns out of the wrong hands. But as long as most guns are purchased impulsively, you’re not going to stop most hard-core gunnies from buying more guns just because they have to jump through another legal hoop. As long as someone buys the damn things, some of them will be used either on purpose or accidentally in ways that create harm. Like I keep saying, it’s the gun stupid. It’s the gun.

 

 

How Do Teens Get Guns? From Their Parents - Where Else?

September 23, 2024

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This week’s JAMA article on whether and to what degree gun laws impact the carrying of guns by teenagers reflects, to me, both the great strengths and inherent weaknesses of the public health approach to research on gun violence. This is not to say that public health research in toto should be abandoned or in any way proscribed, although the NRA would no doubt endorse a variation of the anti-lawyer joke, ‘What do we call 10,000 public health researchers buried under water? A good start,’ (there should only be 10,000 public health researchers.)

The strength of public health gun research is that it is grounded in the idea that guns are a risk to health, and if anyone doubts that rather mundane statement, frankly, what follows isn’t for you. I have written nearly 400 commentaries on my own website and I’m done trying to convince the “other side” that guns create risk. You don’t believe it, take another puff on your cigarette and go lay brick, okay?

Public health research has informed us about gun risk relative to homicide, suicide, assault and domestic violence. It has been instrumental in linking gun violence to the absence and/or presence of regulations and laws. It has also enabled us to better understand how the existence of a massive civilian arsenal affects criminal behavior in this country as opposed to every other industrialized country where unregulated guns do not abound. And I should add that the pro-gun response to public health is so intellectually vapid that I would be insulting gun owners to say that their interests have been supported by anything remotely smacking of serious research. Noise ain’t research.

The weakness with public health gun research, however, is that it proves nearly impossible to validate its findings through studies that capture before-and-after changes in public policies and laws. This is because most of the regulatory and legal responses to gun violence over the past twenty years have been changes that eased regulations and restrictions on gun ownership and gun access, rather than making it more difficult for guns to get into the ‘wrong hands.’ To the degree that public health researchers have been able to compare the results of changes in the regulatory environment that promoted safer-gun use, the examples have not been definitive or comprehensive enough to bolster a generic ‘more gun laws equals less gun violence’ argument.

The authors of this current study are aware of these limitations and, in fact, are at pains to assure the readers that their conclusions are, at best, inferential and would need further validation before definitive conclusions could be reached. Nevertheless, certain important findings stand out, chief among them the correlation between teen-age gun access and the level of gun regulation and per-capita gun ownership in different states.

Teen access to guns is probably, in all its dimensions, the single, most important problem facing the constituencies who want to reduce gun violence. This is not only because the age cohort 14-19 is where gun violence first becomes a significant behavioral and health issue, but kids who acquire guns in the pre-adult years tend to keep using them as they move into their adult years. If we could do a better job restricting teen access to guns, it would have a significant impact on the overall rate of gun violence.

Buried in the conclusion of this study, however, is a caveat that deserves further comment, namely, the degree to which teen gun access is clearly associated with the number of guns owned by adults. And the level of gun ownership wouldn’t be an issue per se if it weren’t for the attempts by the NRA to reduce the minimum age for handgun purchase and promoting the idea that guns are ‘cool.’ Most Americans live in states that do not regulate whether parents give their children access to guns. If you’re a gun-owning adult, you wouldn’t let your teen-age children drink and drive, but you’ll let them play around with the guns, right?

He’s Ba-ack. Dick Heller And the NRA Come Up Short In Court.

September 20, 2024

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Were it not for the fact that the 68 square miles that covers Washington, D.C. wasn’t owned lock, stock and barrel by the Federal Government, most of the decisions reached by the D.C. District Court wouldn’t attract much attention, even when the decisions go up to the United States Court of Appeals. But the gun cases brought by Dick Heller and the NRA aren’t your local, garden-variety of court cases and the D.C. District Court isn’t some town magistrate dealing with whether the town has the right to prohibit overnight parking on all local streets. Nope, the D.C. District Court has been the scene of three separate 2nd Amendment cases whose rulings have become Law of the Land.

The first case brought by Heller – Heller I - went all the way to the Supreme Court in 2008 and resulted in the decision which basically said that the Constitution gave American citizens the right to keep a handgun in their homes for self-defense. The second case – Heller II – was a challenge to the gun registration scheme put into place by the D.C. cops following Heller I, which allowed D.C. residents to purchase and own handguns under conditions that were so onerous and difficult that handgun ownership remained a barely-realizable fact.

Dick Heller

As a result of Heller II, the District of Columbia revised its licensing rules, changing certain procedures, eliminating others and adding a few new ones, all of which provoked Heller and his NRA-backed legal team to initiate the action now known as Heller III. This case was decided by the Court of Appeals on September 18, and while the NRA lauded the decision as “bringing gun ownership within reach to more of D.C.’s upstanding residents,” the Appeals Court reaffirmed what I believe are the most fundamental gun-control tenets of all; namely, the right of the government to engage in the practice and policy of regulating guns.

The truth is that the ultimate policy objective of the gun lobby is to completely de-regulate the ownership and use of guns. The NRA can mouth all the pious platitudes in the world about how only ‘law-abiding’ citizens should own guns, but in the name of Constitutional freedom they have attempted to stymie even the most minimal government efforts to keep guns out of the ‘wrong hands.’ If there even is a gun problem, the response of the gun lobby is to ‘fix’ the mental-health system, a non-sequitur if I ever heard one, or increase penalties for gun crimes, despite the fact that every, single gun used illegally or inappropriately first entered the market through a legal sale. What’s the NRA’s plan for preventing the massive and continuous flow of guns from the good guys to the bad guys? Let every good guy walk around with a gun.

From a pro-gun perspective, the Heller III decision voided some of the DC registration rules which, as far as I’m concerned, weren’t of great value at all. This included dropping the ‘one gun a month’ rule, the re-registration of guns and a requirement that every gun owner pass a test on current DC gun laws. Most importantly, what the decision upheld was the constitutionality of gun registration per se, and perhaps even more important the use of ‘intermediate scrutiny’ for deciding the constitutionality of gun-control laws. Had the Court agreed with the NRA’s argument that the government’s attempt to regulate gun ownership could only be decided on the basis of ‘strict scrutiny,’ i.e., a law is only valid if it fits the exact issue for which it has been designed, you could basically throw out every gun-control statute that has ever been passed.

The Court also upheld the requirement that D.C. gun owners must take an online course in gun safety which I took while I ate breakfast, paid some bills and watched Morning Joe. If the gun-control community thinks they won a partial victory because the Court upheld this part of the D.C. law they should think again. Affirming the government’s right to control firearms is one thing; affirming a silly and useless gun regulation is something else.

 

 

 

Want To Get A New Assault Rifle For $5 Bucks? Join The NRA.

September 18, 2024

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If any of you think that anyone in the gun industry might want to reconsider their commitment to assault rifles in the wake of ‘black’ guns being tossed out of Walmart, think again. I just received my 3rd or 4th or maybe 10th email from Wayne-o reminding me to pony up five bucks for the 3rd Annual NRA Gun Raffle, and choose any one of 12 guns or, if I like, all 12 twelve guns which “any American gun enthusiast would like to own.” And in case there was any doubt in my mind about why I should enter with a chance to win, Wayne-o’s email goes on to remind me that I don’t want to ”miss this opportunity to enter to WIN the guns that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg want to BAN, along with many other great firearms!”

I know something about gun raffles because my gun shop used to be the site for an annual raffle to benefit the state Ducks Unlimited chapter which, in case you don’t know them, is a conservation and hunting organization founded in 1927 as an offshoot of the original hunting-conservationist effort, Boone & Crockett Club, that was started by Teddy Roosevelt and some friends in 1887 before TR went scampering up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War. Hunters and conservationists were one and the same back in those days, because hunters understood the necessity to preserve and extend natural areas for the survival and protection of game. The Ducks Unlimited raffle that I supported raised money for wildlife programs and preservation of wetlands in and around my state; you didn’t have to even own a gun to feel this was something worthy of your support.

If memory serves me correctly, the Ducks Unlimited raffle gave away five or six guns, all of them rifles and shotguns used for sport or the hunt. There was always a beautiful Beretta over-and-under, usually with a Ducks Unlimited logo engraved on the case and the gun; a Marlin 39A 22-caliber lever-action carbine with the gold-inlaid stock; a magnum-caliber Weatherby for elk and a Marlin 336 for white-tail deer. One year the guy who won the Weatherby told me he really didn’t want the gun so I bought it from him and it’s still sitting around somewhere in the basement or out in the garage.

Want to know what are the guns you can win from the NRA? The raffle’s main prize is a Ruger SR-762, which has nothing to do with the Ruger 77 bolt-action rifles that the old man designed and made Bill Ruger’s name famous both here and abroad. The SR-762 is a 30-caliber assault rifle which retails for more than $2,500 and shoots a 30-caliber round through a piston-type of operating system that promises to deliver “superior operating endurance” for every tactical need.

You can choose a Ruger for your raffle ticket but you can also select five other assault-style guns, including the Larue Tactical PredetAR rifle, the M4 V1 carbine from Daniel Defense, the KRISS Vector CRB Carbine and theTavor-IDF IDF 16 rifle with a Mepro 21 sight. The last-named gun comes out of Israel and is made by the same company which many years ago gave us the lovely little machine pistol known as the Uzi which, if you recall, was considered by the Bush Administration too dangerous to be imported after 1989. I love it when Wayne-o tries to make believe that only Democrats, Liberals and native-born Kenyans want to ban guns.

Fully half of the twelve guns in this year’s NRA raffle are assault rifles, and don’t give me any crap about they’re not assault rifles, they’re really some figment of the NSSF fantasy-world called ‘modern, sporting’ guns. Make no mistake, they are designed to kill human beings and they have nothing to do with hunting or sport. That’s the way the gun industry has changed, and that’s the reason the industry needs to be kicked in the ass until it returns to honesty and common sense.

 

 

 

 

Did You Know That Gun Owners Are America’s Most Persecuted Minority? Just Ask Dana Loesch.

September 16, 2024

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If I were an African-American or a member of some other racial or ethnic minority, it would really be comforting to know that the cause of racial equality is being championed by a gun-toting woman named Dana Loesch. Not only does Dana understand gender issues, but she claims to be a gun owner, which by definition means she knows all about prejudice and being a member of the most persecuted minority group of all. But thanks to the NRA and its video series, Freedom’s Safest Place, Dana’s now able to defend my minority rights and the rights of all law-abiding Americans who know they’ll be safer if they use and carry a gun.

When you’re a member of a persecuted minority like Dana, it’s easy for you to identify the people who persecute you the most. And Dana’s been on a rant lately concerning the Numero Uno persecutor, the arrogant, elitist, New Yorker Michael Bloomberg, who keeps getting an assist from another no good, anti-gunner named Shannon Watts. Dana began issuing warnings about Bloomberg’s racism earlier this year when she linked to an audio of remarks made by Mayor Mike at an Aspen conference at which he allegedly stated that “ninety-five percent” of all murders were committed by “minorities” which, according to Dana, means African-American males. And since, according to Dana, only about half of all murders in America are committed by African-Americans, here’s proof-positive that Bloomberg’s just another racist White guy trying to disarm all the Blacks.

bloomberg Now in fact, if you actually listen to the Bloomberg tape, what he’s referring to is New York City where violent crime happens to be an uncontested feature of minority life, but the word ‘minority’ in New York City doesn’t refer only to Blacks, it means all the residents of economically impacted inner-city ghettos like Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn, Jamaica in Queens, Upper Harlem in Manhattan, Port Richmond in Staten Island and most of the South Bronx. Nobody living in a million-dollar co-op on Manhattan’s trendy Upper West Side needs to be worried about getting mugged, ditto residents in Brooklyn Heights or Forest Hills. And this is what Bloomberg meant in correctly using the term ‘minority’ when he answered a question at Aspen, and this is what Dana Loesch has consciously misrepresented in attacking both Mayor Mike and Shannon Watts in her recent tweets.

Believe it or not, I don’t really blame Dana Loesch for making up an argument about guns based on whole cloth. A girl has to earn a living, and while I’m sure we’ll soon see a line of Loesch leather garments for professional S&M dommes, Dana’s just stupidly parroting a line about guns and African-Americans that the NRA has been pushing for the last several years.

Back in the 1990s, the gun industry discovered that people like me who owned guns for hunting and sport were slowly dying off and not being replaced. So they invented a new reason to buy guns -protection from crime - which meant that gun owners were really protecting themselves from the you-know-who’s. And if you doubt that gun ownership for self-protection wasn’t part and parcel of a racist appeal, take a look at the television spots that Charlton Heston produced for the NRA.

The good news is that the strategy kept people buying guns. The bad news is that while gun sales continue to go up, the number of gun owners keeps going down. So the industry and its promoters have to find new markets wherever they can. Enter the likes of Dana Loesch with messages crafted for both minorities and moms, neither group, incidentally, showing much inclination to run into gun shops and pull bangers off the shelves.

Dana, let me break the news gently to you and your like-minded friends. You’re talking to yourselves and nobody who knows or cares anything about history, facts, or the reality of inner-city life is going to take you seriously. And gun violence is a serious issue, which is why you have nothing to contribute at all.

Want To Do Something About Gun Violence? There’s A Meeting For You On November 3rd.

September 16, 2024

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I was born in Washington, DC and one of my earliest memories was being taken by my mother to a concert at the resplendent National Cathedral, the towering Gothic edifice which until the recent re-making of downtown, used to be one of the tallest building in our Nation’s Capitol. The ‘cathedral,’ as we all used to call it, was much more than the seat of Washington’s Episcopal Diocese; it was also a site that attracted visitors worldwide and had been the venue for many events that symbolized what America was all about.

Some Presidents , including both Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, journeyed up Massachusetts Avenue following their inaugurations to participate in prayer, other Presidents – Ford, Eisenhower – lay in repose at the Cathedral following their deaths. Although the Constitution still gives everyone the right to follow whatever religion we choose, or not to follow any religion for that matter, the Congress designated the Cathedral as the “national house of prayer,” and what the Rev. Eugene Sutton called a “soaring, majestic place” still evokes the same wonderment in me today as it did when I walked into the building for the first time as a six-year old little boy.

Leaving aside its historical, architectural and spiritual significance for a moment, the Cathedral has also not shied away from confronting public issues which impact all of us from day to day. And if you believe there’s any public issue that demands our attention more than the issue of gun violence, don’t waste your time trying to convince me that I’m barking up the wrong tree. I’m not saying there aren’t other issues that need to be addressed, but gun violence is the only public problem for which a loud and incessant chorus repeats ad nauseum that no issue exists at all. There’s no gun violence according to the NRA; there’s no gun violence according to the NSSF. In fact, the NSSF was just awarded a $2.4 million DOJ grant to help them continue their “effective” Project Chlldsafe program which is so effective that unintentional gun deaths and injuries have increased over the last few years.

If the National Cathedral is the nation’s house of prayer, it also functions as the nation’s public conscience. There is no religious organization that has been as consistently and publicly concerned about equality, promoting freedom of choice and freedom of being over all racial, religious and gender lines. In fact, the very last pulpit from which Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a sermon before he was struck down by an assassin’s bullet was the pulpit at the National Cathedral. The Cathedral was the scene of lively debates about wars in Viet Nam and Iraq; its leadership, both religious and lay, spoke out about the injustices of Abu Ghirab and the Cathedral sponsors an ongoing initiative to help veterans overcome the wounds of war.

And now the Cathedral will become a focal point for voicing concerns about gun violence when they sponsor a national forum on gun violence scheduled for Tuesday, November 3rd. The meeting will bring together all the different constituencies who want to see some “common-sense” solutions put into place: political leaders, advocates, public policy experts and, most important of all, victims and survivors of gun violence themselves. There will be a webcast, exhibits and tables run by the advocacy groups; it’s an opportunity to strengthen and extend the concerns we all share about putting an end to the senseless and destructive use of guns.

I just looked at the latest video treats offered by the NRA, It’s a series called Freedom

Safest Place and it features some of our country’s most notable freedom-fighters like felon Oliver North and home-schooling expert Dana Loesch. I don’t notice that anyone who was injured with a gun ever comes out on behalf of the NRA. Isn’t it funny how the victims of gun violence always seem to end up on the other side of the debate? And that’s the reason why the people who come to the National Cathedral on November 3rd will ultimately win.

 

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