Do More Guns Equal Less Crime? Not Any More.

August 30, 2024

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If I had a nickel for every time the NRA reminds us that gun violence is down while gun ownership is up, I wouldn’t have to work for a living. Not that writing is such hard work, mind you, but my previous comment still stands. And the latest ‘more guns = less crimes’ was just posted by the NRA, which linked to a comment by Charles Cooke in National Review, who compares current crime data to the numbers from 1993 and concludes that “national rates of gun violence are strikingly lower now than during their peak in the mid-1990s,” although he admits that the rate has “declined less dramatically since 2000.” The source cited by Cooke shows that 94% of the decline from 1993 occurred by 2000 and he refers to a 6% drop over the last 14 years as “less dramatic?”

This celebration of the drop in gun homicides coincident with the increase in gun sales has been spun again and again by the NRA and its helpmate, the NSSF. And while nobody has ever been able to determine whether there’s any causal relationship between gun purchases and crime rates, the coincidence of the latter going down while the former continues to go up is a major argument in the pro-gun playbook for promoting gun rights.

conference program pic There’s only one little problem, however. We won’t know for sure until early next year, but preliminary data appears to indicate that the two-decade drop in gun homicides has come to an end. The best numbers I can find do not come from the FBI, but from the CDC. And the reason why CDC numbers are more reliable is they are based on comprehensive state public health data which is based on coroner’s reports, whereas FBI numbers are based on local law enforcement agency data which is notoriously incomplete and, in fact, is not required to be reported at all.

The CDC data clearly indicates that the raw number of gun homicides stopped dropping by 2000, and the gun homicide rate has dropped minimally since 2000 as well. In 1993 gun homicides and rates were 18,253 and 6.75; in 1999 they were 10,828 and 3.83; in 2013 they were 11,208 and 3.55. Cooke’s statement that post-2000 gun violence has declined “less dramatically” is, to be polite, not consistent with the facts. And further, it should be noted that gun homicides stopped dropping exactly at the time when gun sales started rising; i.e., since 2009. Annual gun sales, as estimated by NICS background checks, have nearly doubled under Obama; gun homicides have remained stable or moved slightly up. So much for the nonsense about how guns and/or concealed weapons permits protect us from violent crime.

The news may get worse for 2015. The best real-time data I can find is captured by the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks gun violence through a combination of agency and media reports. This methodology has severe limitations, if only because media reports on gun violence by definition are woefully incomplete, and agency reporting is never done on a real-time basis. Which means that the 8,616 gun deaths counted by GVA so far this year must be an understatement, but it would still work out to nearly 13,000 gun deaths this year. And this increase is borne out by data from specific cities like Chicago, whose gun homicide rate is up over last year, ditto New York, ditto Milwaukee, St. Louis and Detroit.

It will be interesting to watch pro-gun zealots spin the news about how guns protect us from crime when gun sales continue to soar but so does violent crime. Who knows? Maybe they’ll decide that all those armed citizens walking around need to spend more time outside their homes making sure the streets are safe. Or maybe everyone should carry both a Glock and Bushmaster in plain sight. There’s really no limit to the fantasies you can concoct when the entire argument about how guns protect us from crime is based on facts that don’t exist. No limit at all.

 

 

 

 

Guess Who Owns The Argument About Gun Violence? It Ain’t The NRA.

May 31, 2024

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Right after Sandy Hook we were treated to a rant from Wayne-o in which the head of the NRA blamed gun violence, among other things, on “a thousand music videos that portray life as a joke and murder as a way of life.” He then castigated “media conglomerates” for bringing murder and violence as entertainment motifs into every American home. In defending gun ownership following this horrendous gun violence event, the NRA found it expedient and effective to rally its troops around the idea that popular culture and gun culture don’t mix.

I think that June 2, touted as Gun Violence Awareness Day, may mark a true turning-point in the argument about guns. The pro-gun community can lobby all it wants for laws that make it easier to own or carry guns, but fewer gun restrictions won’t really matter if the country’s dominant culture becomes anti-gun. And while the NRA has been promoting gun ownership as their response to the “culture wars,” the millennial culture that is emerging and will define the country appears to be solidly anti-gun.

june2 How can I say that when recent opinion polls indicate that a majority of Americans believe that guns make America a safer place? I’ll tell you why. First, the surveys which ask Americans if guns make them safer also show that less than a majority actually own guns. Second, despite the Obama-driven spike in gun sales, the industry has not managed to penetrate new demographics such as women and minorities; most guns and ammunition sold in the last few years went to the same-old, same-old who bought those guns for the same reason that gun sales have spiked at other times, namely, the fear of losing their guns. Finally and most important, the social and political views of millennials are completely at odds with the socio-demographic profile of the gun-owning population, and as millennials become the dominant generation, this could have dire consequences for the health and even survival of the gun industry as a whole.

According to Pew, a majority of millennials support gay rights, less than a majority are patriotic, only one-third are religious and they voted Obama in 2012. As for Boomers, who buy and own most of the guns, they don’t support gays, they are fiercely patriotic, a majority are religious and they split their vote evenly in 2012. What these numbers tell me is that over the next twenty years, the gun industry better come up with a wholly different argument for owning guns.

Gun Violence Awareness Day, as reported ruefully by Brietbart and other pro-gun blogs, garnered support from movie, song and media personalities like Russell Simmons, Aasif Mandvi, Padma Lakshmi, Amanda Peet, Tunde Adebimpe and many, many more. I’m actually a pre-boomer, and I don’t have the faintest idea who any of these people are. But I do know the celebs who show up each year at the NRA shindig; guys like Chuck Norris and Ollie North. Wow – talk about young, hip and cool.

Another master-stroke in planning this event was using orange to build identity and awareness for the folks who get involved. Orange, or blaze orange as it is known, has always been worn by hunters and many states require it for anyone goes out after game. Brady and Shannon’s Moms, among other organizations, have lately moved into the safety space which was owned lock, stock and barrel by the NRA. Guess who now shares and could soon own that space?

Until recently, the playing field where gun violence arguments played out was controlled by the NRA. But right now the field is tilting the other way. And notice how millennial culture has no problem attaching the word ‘violence’ to the word ‘guns.’ This alone should make the NRA wonder if their message can win or even compete for hearts and minds. The NRA always assumed that gun owners would defend their guns while everyone else just sat by. After June 2nd, I wouldn’t want to take that assumption to the bank.

Physicians Need To Be Engaged In Preventing Gun Violence Right From The Start.

May 25, 2024

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In 1969 I was a caseworker for the Cook County Welfare Department, working out of the West Madison office near Garfield Park in Chicago’s West Side. The neighborhood, then and now, was considered one of the city’s more troubled areas characterized by high levels of crime and low levels of economic opportunity; not quite as bad as some other Chicago neighborhoods but not a place where I would ever feel comfortable or at home. And when I recently looked at the Chicago Tribune’s crime map, it hardly came as a surprise that East Garfield was still a place where getting shot or shot at is a regular feature of life in that part of town.

Actually, Chicago is right now enjoying a slight respite from the gun violence of the past few years with 2015 shootings running about 20% lower than in 2014. I’m not sure, however, that the word ‘enjoying’ actually fits what happened this past weekend because so far during the holiday there have been 9 killed and 32 others wounded by gunfire and Memorial Day celebration still has one more day to go. Is it actually possible that a city of 2.7 million could end up with 50 shooting victims in just 3 days? Last year, New York with twice as many people experienced 10 shootings over the holiday weekend and the media called it a “shooting spree.” When it comes to gun violence, Chicago is hardly the “Second City,” that’s for sure.

conference program pic Of course the crime numbers on Chicago’s West Side are appreciably different from where Barack and Michelle live in the South Side neighborhood known as Hyde Park. This area surrounding the University of Chicago and counting about the same number of residents as east Garfield recorded only 6 violent crimes in the past month. I suspect that crime in Hyde Park will drop even further in 2017 when the President comes home to live full-time surrounded by a phalanx of Secret Service agents complete with dogs, anti-crime patrols, choppers, the whole Presidential security bit.

In addition to the Obamas, Hyde Park is also home to the Chicago Crime Lab, a research and think-tank at the University supported by a who’s who of America’s glitterati foundations and various government funding sources. The Lab has published significant research on gun violence, much of the work conducted by Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig and one of their reports, Gun Violence Among School-Age Youth in Chicago, stands out as a model for public health research of this kind. The report deserves to be read in its entirety, but my self-imposed space limitation requires me to focus on only one major theme, namely, the fact that youth who engage in gun violence can usually be spotted at a very young age.

The report argues that children start to exhibit behavior that pushed them to get their hands on guns by the time they reach middle school years; i.e., the eighth grade. This report was published in 2009 but America’s foremost criminologist, Marvin Wolfgang, basically made the same argument in his remarkable book, Delinquency in a Birth Cohort, published in 1972. Wolfgang didn’t tie delinquency to gun violence per se, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to assume the connection between repeated delinquency, serial criminality and access to guns.

If, as Cook and Ludwig argue, behavior predictive of gun violence begins to appear at a young age, their call for interventions by school authorities and community programs lacks one vital piece. Every young child in cities like Chicago is examined by a physician at least once each year. And who better than physicians are trained to diagnose youth behavior that might create risk? When it comes to children’s health, we need to think of gun violence not just as a socio-economic phenomenon, but as a medical condition whose diagnosis and treatment should be handled by the same medical professionals who make sure that kids are immunized against measles, mumps and the flu.

 

 

Want To Defend The 2nd Amendment? Go Shopping.

April 27, 2024

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Last week another idiot wearing a sheriff’s badge announced he would not enforce any law extending NICS background checks to private gun transfers in Oregon because keeping guns away from felons and other dangerous folks wasn’t on his list of priorities. At least this particular lawman had the good sense to justify his enforcement concerns because of duty demands made on the deputies under his command; several weeks earlier an even bigger idiot with a sheriff’s badge in Oregon stated that he wouldn‘t enforce a new background check law because he considered it to be “borderline treasonous.”

I may be wrong, but I always thought that the role of law enforcement was to enforce the law, not to decide which laws to enforce. Nobody’s arguing with the fact that when it comes to public safety you can’t take a cat down from a tree while the building across the street burns down. And I happen to be 100% pro-cop, I really am. I’ve seen cops and other first responders rush into dangerous situations while civilians like myself sat back and quietly gave thanks that we didn’t have to go in there ourselves. But this nonsense about not enforcing gun-control laws is nothing other than a cynical, calculated ploy to build anti-government (read: anti-liberal, anti-Democrat) sentiment in red-leaning districts and gun-rich states. The idea that we need to stand up against gun-grabbing Obama because he represents some kind of illegitimate power-grab is a recipe for talk among fools, and I’m being polite.

2A The sheriffs in Oregon seem to be part of a national trend of lawmen allegedly protecting the 2nd Amendment whenever a state passes a new law restricting the purchase or use of guns. A group of these sheriffs were particularly active in Colorado where expanded background checks were made into law; another bunch of 2nd-Amendment sheriffs met with Governor Jerry Brown in California while he was considering which gun bills to sign and which to reject; even in liberal New York State a couple of sheriffs publicly stated they would not enforce Andy’s SAFE Act after it became law.

Some of these disgruntled lawmen follow Oathkeepers, a group founded by a former Ron Paul staffer, dedicated to defending the Constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” With all due respect to the concern for foreign enemies, the group appears to be much more worried about threats from the Bureau of Land Management (you may recall the ongoing dispute with rancher Cliven Bundy) than anything being cooked up in Syria or Iraq. The poster-boy for this crackpot bunch is a former Arizona sheriff, Richard Mack, who runs his own cabal called Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association which claims to be the “last line of defense” although I’m not sure against what.

The CSPOA claims to have enlisted over 500 sheriffs to “stand” with the 2nd Amendment and they have also “trained” 300 sheriffs in Constitutional rights. What I find most interesting about this group is the endless array of ads for products and other commercial schemes that evidently help fulfill the requirements for Constitutional defense. You can protect yourself in an “uncertain world” by stocking up on freeze-dried and dehydrated foods, or reach a new level of personal security by getting into a military-style body armor vest. For those who want to make absolutely sure they won’t face threats in the most intimate and personal moments, you can register at the Patriot Date website and find the girl or guy who shares your Constitutional dreams.

The organizations worried about the erosion of our Constitutional rights are nothing more than commercial scams. Which is fine when you stop to think about it, because if nothing else, the Constitution gives us all the unalterable right to buy and sell. When it comes to threats to my Constitutional rights, the greatest threat would be if Amazon suddenly stopped debiting my Visa card. If that ever occurs, I’m sure Sheriff Mack will accept my payment for something he’s selling, no questions asked.

 

Want To Take A Public Health Approach To Gun Violence? Ask The NRA For Help.

March 29, 2024

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Here we go again. Another state, Texas, is going to try and keep physicians from talking to patients about gun ownership thanks to a bill newly-filed by a state representative named Stuart Spitzer, who happens to be a general surgeon with a medical degree from UT-Southwestern Medical School. The proposed bill goes further than the celebrated Docs vs. Glocks Florida statute which prohibits inquiry into gun ownership but makes an exception in cases where the physician believes that a serious medical problem might arise if the patient has access to a gun. The Texas law contains no such provision, and simply says that any physician, other than a psychiatrist, cannot ask a patient to disclose firearm ownership, period. The end.

The bill’s sponsor peddles the standard nonsense about how this law will protect gun ownership because, according to him, the moment that such information is entered into a patient’s file, the Federal Government will be able to find out who has guns and who doesn’t. This outright lie has been floating around the paranoid internet since Obama took office, even though the NRA has refuted it on their website. But if Glenn Beck can find customers to stock up on freeze-dried food for the coming apocalypse, how hard is it for a Texas legislator to make others believe that Big Brother is waiting to grab their guns after a visit to their local doctor?

docs versus glocks Even though studies show that most patients really don’t care if their doctor asks them about guns, people are sometimes susceptible to this blatant attempt at fear-mongering because they simply don’t understand the methods used by the public health community to define and treat medical risk. It’s easy to get all worked up about Ebola because the danger is obvious; you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that with mortality rates above 50%, doing whatever is necessary to avoid this disease is a priority for government and citizens alike. But is there a consensus on the medical risks posed by guns? In a funny way there is such a consensus, but it’s based on the idea that guns don’t pose any medical risk at ball.

At the same time that public health researchers argue that the risks of guns outweighs the benefits, the NRA pushes the opposite point of view. And while research clearly supports the public health position on gun risk, the NRA continues to use a bogus telephone survey by Gary Kleck and some thoroughly-discredited statistical nonsense from John Lott to sell the idea that guns are essential tools in protecting us from crime. Using the fear of crime as a justification for guns is a master stroke of marketing because a majority of Americans now agree with the pro-gun point of view.

Know why the NRA and its allies have been so successful selling the positive utility of guns? Because they have adopted a public health strategy for convincing the public and the lawmakers that what they are saying is true. First, identify the disease, which in this case is harm caused by crime. Then identify how the disease is spread, in this case contact with a criminal. Now develop a vaccine, i.e., the gun, and immunize as many as people as possible with concealed carry, now legal in all 50 states.

The problem in trying to sell the public health solution to any medical problem, as David Hemenway reminds us, is that unlike medicine, “the focus of public health is not on cure, but on prevention.” This usually requires a long, comprehensive strategy combining research, education and laws. Recognizing that most people aren’t usually responsive to solutions which don’t immediately work, the NRA has fast-tracked the process. The real problem in the gun debate is that the side which is totally resistant to an honest, public health approach to guns has shown itself remarkably adept at turning that same approach on its head and getting exactly what it wants.

 

Now We Finally Know Why Those Gun-Grabbing Doctors Ask Patients About Guns.

February 3, 2024

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The Woodward News of Woodward, OK, is now running a series of articles based on the ”research” of their staff writer, Rachel Van Horn, as to why physicians are asking patients about gun ownership. The problem arose in Woodward when a town resident was asked about gun ownership during a routine intake interview conducted before her physical exam. Of course in this cattle town of 12,000 people it would be difficult to find someone who didn’t own a gun, nevertheless, the patient felt her privacy had been invaded, thus leading to the effort by the News to figure out what’s going on.

docs versus glocks The issue of physicians and guns just doesn’t seem to want to go away, largely because physicians are becoming more assertive in voicing their concerns about guns, while the gun industry continues its efforts to convince gun owners that the medical establishment is the implacable foe of 2nd Amendment rights. It’s now routine that every medical society issues a statement deploring gun violence, while the NRA continues its efforts first realized in Florida, the Gunshine State, to prevent physicians from talking to patients about guns.

Given this background, Ms. Van Horn stepped boldly into the controversy, hoping to discover the actual “origins” of the question of gun ownership which now appears routinely on medical questionnaires from Woodard, OK to Washington, D.C. and back again to Woodward. First she learned that the question is now listed on the various Electronic Medical Records (EMR) intake forms used by most clinicians in the United States. But none of the companies that produce EMR software would respond to Ms. Van Horn’s requests for information so that was a dead end. Then she went after the Medicaid and Medicare folks, figuring this might lead her to the nation’s Number One gun-grabber, a.k.a. Obama, but again she came up with a blank.

But then Van Horn found an important clue, because it turns out that the gun ownership question “appears in nearly the exact same format, regardless of which software company produces the program.” Which means there must be some gun-grabber hiding under a bed somewhere who’s ultimately responsible for this nefarious and evil attempt to disarm the good people of Woodward and everywhere else. No guarantees, but our intrepid reporter might have unearthed the source, namely, the American Academy of Pediatrics which, according to her research, published a statement in October, 2012 calling for a question on gun ownership to be included in all patient examinations and histories. Had she bothered to read the actual report, she might have noticed that the same sentence also advised parents “to prevent access to these guns by children.”

I want to talk about this issue of gun access. This past weekend, a 3-year old in New Mexico grabbed a handgun out of his mother’s purse and shot her and her husband, neither of whom luckily died from their injuries. Last month in Idaho a 2-year old pulled a gun out of his mother’s purse and shot her to death. Now I’ll bet you that both of these mothers wouldn’t ever have put their toddler into a car without buckling up the safety harness. And I guarantee you that their pediatricians would have asked them about seat-belt use during routine medical examinations, and neither of these women would have considered the question to be offensive or an invasion of their privacy.

So what makes asking whether or not someone locks away their guns different? I’ll tell you what makes it different. It’s the fantasy that an unsecured gun, as opposed to an unsecured seatbelt doesn’t represent a risk because we need guns to protect us from God knows who or what. And the gun industry has been promoting this fantasy for the last twenty years without a shred of credible evidence to back it up. And guess who just happens to have conducted serious and definitive research that indicates the reverse?

 

Want To See The Gun Industry Flex Its Creative Muscles? Go To SHOT.

January 24, 2025

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I went to my first SHOT show in 1981, and I can tell you that the only thing about the show that hasn’t changed from then until now is the name, which stands for Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade show, but has about as much to do with outdoor sports like hunting and old-fashioned shooting as a man in the moon. I’m not saying that the old stalwarts like Browning or Leupold or Mossy Oak clothing aren’t there. Outdoor sporting goods manufacturers are at SHOT in abundance, because it’s the only time all year that gun industry manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers and customers get to mingle under one roof, check out new products, place orders and spend time doing what is always done at trade shows – schmoozing, eating, and after the show closes down, drinking.

nssf But don’t for one minute imagine that the crowd at SHOT just can’t wait to run out of the Sands Convention Center and paint the town. Actually, a majority of the attendees are Ma and Pa types from smaller towns, fairly conservative, older, hard-working White folks who form the backbone of the gun industry because that’s who still owns a majority of the guns. And since the gun business may be the last consumer product category which still relies on small, independent shopkeepers for the great majority of retail sales, the show attendance tends to reflect this traditional demographic both in terms of attitudes and tastes. It goes without saying, of course, that you can’t walk very far without seeing some kind of anti-Obama poster, and Sarah Palin drew a crowd when she appeared at the Outdoor Channel booth to plug yet another onscreen effort to make people forget that she’s really faded from the political scene. Next year’s SHOT will no doubt attract all the Republicans who are hoping to succeed the gun industry’s most successful salesman, and talking about sales, the mood at the show was definitely upbeat.

Now I never met a salesman who didn’t believe that things were always going to be better tomorrow than they were yesterday or are today. And the takeaway from this year’s show was that innovation and new products were back in the forefront because the industry needed to flex its “creative muscles” after spending the last several years filling all those backorders that piled up thanks to the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and his stance on guns. The good news for the gun industry is that, practically speaking, there’s little that Obama can do to hurt gun owners now that both chambers of Congress are painted bright red. But this didn’t stop Steve Sanetti, President of the NSSF which owns the SHOT show, from getting up at the big SHOT dinner to report that the “state” of the gun industry was “determined.” And what was the industry determined to do? According to Sanetti, the industry is going to expand its efforts to counter the “mis-information” about gun violence spread by the “anti-gun lobby, close-minded legislators and sensationalist-seeking media.”

And how did Sanetti demonstrate that the anti-gun folks were refusing to accept the value of guns? By trotting out the same, old, incorrect statistics on how violent crimes have gone down while gun sales have gone up. If you’re interested, take a look at the NSSF’s own website and you’ll see that since 2001, as gun sales have soared, gun homicides have not declined one bit, and have actually moved slightly back up.

I don’t really blame Sanetti for getting up in front of the faithful and promoting the gun industry in glowing, albeit fanciful terms. He’s a salesman, gun sales have slumped dramatically, and his job is to promote the product in good times and in bad. But one of the exhibitor booths I found most interesting at SHOT contained products made by a company out of Troy, Michigan named BulletSafe Vests. Now what’s a bulletproof vest company doing hawking its products at a shooting, hunting and outdoors show? If this is how the gun industry is flexing its innovative muscles, then shooting sure ain’t what it used to be.

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