Tag Archives: Parkland

Does Emma Need To Be Afraid Of Those Dopes With Their AR-15s? I Hope Not.

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“Going up against the country’s largest gun lobby organization was obviously something that needed to be done, but it means that the people we’re arguing against are the ones with the guns. I am personally deathly afraid of them, and I know, from traveling the country during the summer for the Road to Change tour, that many of the people who disagree with us mean it when they say that they only want to talk if we’re standing on the other end of their AR-15s.”

This is an excerpt from an op-ed written by Emma Gonzalez published today in The New York Times. The piece is making the rounds in Gun-control Nation, and will be used by every gun-control organization to energize the troops for the big showdown on November 6th.

I notice, by the way, that over the last five days, according to Nate Silver, that the odds of the House going blue have slipped from 80.4% to 73.9%, and over that same period, the odds that the GOP will retain control of the Senate have gone from 68.1% to 78%. Weren’t both trends supposed to be going the opposite ways? This mid-term election is beginning to smell slightly like the national election in 2016, a contest on which Gun-control Nation pinned all its hopes and dreams which then came to nothing at all.

That was then, this is now. Now we have remarkable kids like Emma Gonzalez whose determination to inject a note of reality into the gun debate has energized Gun-control Nation like nothing before. It has also, of course, provoked a response from the other side, the Gun-nut Nation side, specifically responses like the one Emma says here: “many of the people who disagree with us mean it when they say that they only want to talk if we’re standing on the other end of their AR-15s.”

Last time I checked, the gun industry claims to have sold somewhere around 15 million AR-15s, or what they used to refer to as ‘modern sporting rifles,’ over the last ten years. The industry no longer promotes this ‘sporting’ nonsense because the word ‘sporting’ is out and the word ‘tactical’ is in. When the President of the United States finds it convenient to excuse the fact that a bunch of schmucks were marching around Charlottesville wearing Nazi armbands and toting their assault rifles to protect a statue of Robert E. Lee, you have to figure that the United States has a tolerance for stupidity unmatched by any other national state.

Unfortunately, the same people who tell you they have a Constitutional ‘right’ to own an AR-15, will also tell you that the Constitution gives them the ‘right’ to wave it in your face. And I am sure that Emma is not exaggerating when she says that she has been threatened by acolytes of Gun-nut Nation in appearances here and there; God knows I get enough crazy emails from the same bunch and I’m not leading a national, gun-control movement like the movement that has emerged in the wake of activities by Emma, David, and their other high school friends.

But in measuring the degree of animosity created by Emma, I think we have to distinguish between serious threats and what, in many cases, is nothing more than an increase in the general volume of hot air. Of course, you can argue that had authorities in Florida responded when Nikolas Cruz first began making a nuisance of himself, perhaps the massacre at Stoneman Douglas High School wouldn’t have occurred. Which is probably true.

On the other hand, why should we surprised when some dopes say they will only debate Emma if she’s in the crosshairs of their guns when the President tells a raptured audience that he would still get elected even after shooting someone down in the street? My friends in Gun-control Nation need to acknowledge that right now verbal excess is not only condoned but expected, particularly when the discussion happens to be about guns.

 

 

 

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When It Comes To Gun Violence, Nothing Like Knowing Your Market.

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If and when Gun-control Nation decides to give out an award to the person who has done more to elevate the national discussion about gun violence, I suspect the winner will be David Hogg. Ever since the Parkland massacre, this 18-year old has been roaming around the United States, appearing on an almost a daily basis at some kind of gun-control event. Occasionally he shows his youth and lack of smarts when, for example, he urged a gathering of Canadians to come across the border and vote for ‘gun-sense’ candidates next month. But by and large, he has captivated audiences with a combination of determined and well-spoken messages about the violence caused by guns.

The only drawback with David’s activities, however, and this is in no way a criticism of anything he has said or done, is that most of his efforts have been spent preaching to the converted, so to speak, whereas it’s the ‘other side,’ the pro-gun folks, who need to hear what he has to say. Which is why it might come as something of a surprise to my Gun-control Nation friends to learn that Gun-nut Nation also has a new poster-boy promoting their point of view, and in this case, he’s yet another Parkland survivor, Kyle Kashuv, who has been appearing at various pro-gun events and even met Sleazy Don during a visit to Washington, D.C.

Back in April, Kashuv gave an interview to the news website Vox, in which he claimed to have never actually touched a gun. The same week he posted a picture of himself on his Twitter page standing at a shooting range holding an AR-15. He was later interrogated by the local cops because school officials at Parkland decided that any school student who promoted using an assault rifle might be considered a threat. The contact with the cops got Kashuv an appearance on the Tucker Carlson nightly show, at which point he became the equivalent of David Hogg for the pro-gun side.

I’m not at all surprised that Gun-nut Nation has developed an alternate reality to explain what happened at Parkland earlier this year. I’m also not surprised that just as David Hogg has become a formidable brand name for media that markets to the gun-control crowd, so Kyle Yashuv has been equally promoted and adored by media which chases the market known as gun ‘rights.’

I started following the ins and outs of the gun debate in 1968 because that’s when the federal government got into gun control big time, which meant that the gun business would be increasingly conditioned on what advocates from both sides had to say about guns. And what I noticed, right from the beginning, was that the media never reported on any gun issue without making sure they had input from ‘both sides.’ And this obsession with making sure that we have ‘balance’ in the gun debate has, if anything, become even more intense as the demand for digital content inexorably grows.

Recall that after the Pulse massacre in 2016, the gay community got more involved in gun-control activities and some of their efforts were circulated through the national print and digital press. Know what also happened after Orlando? The gay-rights groups which promote self-defense guns also got into the media act. And don’t underestimate the appeal of self-defense guns to LGBTQ – as the reporter who wrote a glowing article about gays and guns in Rolling Stone said, “gay rights and gun rights are a natural fit.”

I personally think that identity politics and responses to gun violence are a load of crap. And I further think that it’s just another attempt by self-promoting internet news and product hucksters to enlarge their marketing niche.

The truth is that I don’t care who you are – your age, gender, sexual orientation or a anything else. In the words of Walter Mosely, “If you walk around with a gun, sooner or later it’s going to go off.”

 

Want A Good Conspiracy Theory About Mueller? Try Sandy Hook.

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Today our friend Charles Blow has a column comparing Trump’s reaction to Mueller to how Nixon and Clinton responded to Watergate and Lewinskygate in previous years. The difference, however, is that Mueller’s investigation has yet to uncover a specific connection between the Russians and Trump. And until or unless such a connection is found, is Trump all that wrong when he says that Mueller’s work is just a big ‘witch hunt?’

On the other hand, it takes one to know one, and if there’s one person out there who knows how to fabricate a conspiracy based on unproven assertions, it’s the guy sitting in the Oval Office whose public persona was nourished on conspiracy theories, beginning with the ‘birther’ conspiracy, which Trump continued to peddle even after Obama released a bone-fide birth certificate proving his live birth in the United States.

Trump’s infatuation with conspiracy theories took a big jump forward when he appeared on InfoWars and told Alex Jones that he wouldn’t let Jones down. This was several years after Jones first began promoting the idea that the Sandy Hook massacre was a government-organized hoax, a continuing signature story that eventually got him sued for defamation by parents of some of the children who were shot and killed.

What gave a bit of credibility to the Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists was, unfortunately, the fact that the national media who invaded Newtown right after the massacre began releasing information that again and again turned out to be wrong. The first mistake was made by CNN, which identified the shooter not as Adam Lanza but as his older brother whose driver’s license was found in the car that Adam drove to the school. The ‘honor roll’ of news organizations that had to go back and change something they initially said, included CNN, CBS, AP, The New York Times and NPR. Once these seasoned reporters admitted that they were wrong, their admissions of wrongdoing made it easy for the conspiracy gang to claim the whole thing was a mis-managed, government affair.

I can’t think of a more delicious irony than the idea that the Mueller investigation is just another conspiracy theory, this time peddled not by the Right but by the Left. Because the truth is that the liberal mainstream still can’t believe that someone as seasoned, as professional, as experienced, as deserving as Hillary Rodham Clinton, could have lost this election to a know-nothing, rabble-rousing racist and moronic loudmouth like Donald Trump.

Now the fact that she spent twice as much money on her campaign as he did on his, the fact that she couldn’t be bothered to make a campaign stop in Michigan where she lost the whole state by less than 16,000 votes; somehow these kinds of facts seem to have vanished from the post-election narrative being peddled by Hillary’s friends. And please, please do me a favor and shut up about the so-called need to change the Electoral College, okay? I didn’t notice anyone complaining when Bill Clinton won the 1992 election with a whopping 43% of the popular vote, thanks to the presence of Ross ‘I’ll talk to my people and you talk to your people’ Perot.

The big difference between the Mueller conspiracy theory and the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory is that the latter was based on the idea that the government created something out of nothing in order to push through some kind of ban on privately-owned guns. The funny thing about Obama’s attempt to pass a gun-control bill, which went nowhere the following year, is that it was backed by a guy named Trump, who five days after the massacre, tweeted his support for Obama’s stand.

If Trump really wants to pull the rug out from underneath Mueller, what he needs to do is figure out some kind of connection between Mueller’s investigation and the continuing efforts of David Hogg and the Parkland kids to generate support for a national, gun-control bill. Run that story on InfoWars and Brietbart and it will take on a life of its own.

 

NRA In Trouble? Don’t Bet On It.

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It’s hard to remember but less than two years ago the boys in Fairfax were sitting on top of the world, enjoying not just the election of the first President who they endorsed before he was even the Party’s candidate, but also experiencing a level of access that was the envy of every other lobbying group in and around Washington, D.C.

Then in quick order we had Vegas, then Parkland, then Santa Fe, then Maria Butina, then 3-D guns, and ‘America’s oldest civil rights organization’ finds itself in a dizzying free-fall which may be dragging the NRA down to a level of public criticism and condemnation which it has never experienced before.

Earlier this week our friends at the Center for American Progress released an internet survey showing that a majority (54%) of the 1,000 sampled voters held an ‘unfavorable’ view of the NRA, with 57% saying that corporations should not provide benefits to NRA members. To be fair, the polling company, GBA Associates, works for Democratic candidates, and the respondents’ political leanings were more blue than red, which certainly skews the results somewhat. On the other hand, if this survey is at all representative of the current national mood about guns, the NRA has some catch-up work to do, because even Republican-leaning voters are expressing unease about the current stance and direction of the gun-rights organization.

The real issue, of course, is whether the NRA is feeling this discontent here it counts most – in the bottom line. In 2016, the organization’s total revenue was $366,889,703, of which $181,265,880 came from membership dues and event revenues and $124,433,466 represented contributions (along with some $28M in advertising fees, etc.) For 2015, total revenue was $336 million, derived from $180M in dues and revenues and $95M from contributions.

Unfortunately, as impressive as these numbers appear, digging a bit below the surface shows that the emperor may be starting to lose some of his clothes. Revenue from dues are flat, which means that membership isn’t increasing. And while contributions increased substantially from year to year, other revenue vehicles, such as their vaunted Carry Guard insurance program, isn’t ringing bells at all. In fact, what has really created a storm cloud on the group’s financial horizon is their inability to put together a liability insurance package covering training and media communications, both of which could cause significant financial problems in the years ahead.

Don’t get me wrong. The NRA happens to be without doubt the best membership organization of all time when it comes to the care and feeding of its members. I also belong to the Audubon Society, the Wilderness Society and the National Parks Foundation. Know how often I hear from those groups? Once or twice a year. How often do I hear from Wayne-o or Chris Cox? Multiple times every day. Anyone who wants to believe that the NRA is teetering around on its last legs is somewhere in the middle of a dream sequence that has no reality behind it at all.

Even if it turns out that the House goes from red to blue because a strong gun-control message works in swing districts here and there, this doesn’t mean that a new, gun-control alignment will suddenly appear on Capitol Hill. Right now, the Blue Dog Coalition, a Congressional group which calls themselves ‘conservative Democrats,’ has 18 members, of whom several, in particular Mike Thompson from California, have been fighting the good fight for gun reforms over the last several years. But to win back the House, this group would find themselves augmented by additional members coming from districts where gun control will never be the order of the day.

Like it or not, a majority of Americans believe that a gun represents a good thing to have around the house. This trend didn’t reverse when Democrats last controlled the Hill, and I wouldn’t be quite so quick to consign our Fairfax friends to the ash-heap of history – there are still lots of Americans around who love their guns.

How Do We Define A Mass Shooting? Not The Way We Should.

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It’s official! The influencers and decision-makers who want to do something to reduce gun violence have decided that the definition of a ‘mass shooting’ is four or more people ending up dead, in many instances the toll including the shooter as well. This definition is central to a major analysis of mass shootings published last week by The Washington Post, which claims there have been 152 such events since Gary Gilmore began blasting away from the top of the Texas Tower in August, 1966.

These numbers works out to less than 3 mass shootings per year, which WaPo says is a ‘small slice’ of gun violence, and doesn’t include shootings that took place within a private residence or were street shootings involving gangs. To invent a definition which arbitrarily defines ‘mass’ shootings as only involving events where a certain number of people are killed, while ignoring non-fatal gun injuries, is to feed into a public discussion about gun violence which not only makes no sense, but completely distorts what gun violence is really all about. But right now, let’s stick with what WaPo has to say.

Since DD Trump was inaugurated, there have been 12 mass shootings, resulting in 142 deaths and another 482 individuals wounded or injured but still alive. In the two final years of the Obama regime, there were also 12 mass shootings, with the final toll coming to 115 dead and 100 surviving injuries or wounds. Were it not for the ability of one mass shooter to barricade himself in a hotel room far above an enormous group of potential targets and another who charged into a densely-packed nightclub, right now we would be bumping along with every mass shooting claiming, on average, roughly 7 fatalities and 5 non-fatal assaults.

What I don’t understand in all the ongoing discussion about mass shootings is the obsession we seem to have with defining these events in a way which allows us to keep track of the number of deaths and injuries with a degree of certainty that we never, ever impose on any other attempt to analyze or understand gun violence. By drawing a red line between shootings which occur in public spaces but don’t involve public streets where so-called ‘gang’ shootings occur, we are not only accepting an arbitrary definition of this totally fanciful phenomena known as ‘gang violence,’ but along with drawing another red line between shootings which occur in private spaces (i.e., residences) we are probably reducing the real number of shootings that claim multiple victims by as much as half.

When the cops arrive at a murder scene and nobody saw nuttin’ except the body lying in the street, they describe the event as ‘gang violence.’ That’s the end of that. When the pissed-off ex-husband walks into a family party to which he was disinvited and begins blasting away, he’s not putting a bullet into as many bodies as possible because it’s a private space; he kills everyone he can because that’s where they all happened to be at the same time.

The real reason the FBI narrows its definition of ‘mass shootings’ is because if the agency were to use a definition that took all shootings with multiple deaths into account, or defined a ‘shooting’ as involving multiple victims whether they died or not, all of a sudden their accurate numbers on mass shootings quoted by WaPo and every other mainstream media outlet would disappear.

According to our friends at the Gun Violence Archive, who define a mass shooting as any incident in which 4 people are killed or wounded, there have been 102 such events this year alone, with 130 fatal victims and another 413 who were wounded but survived. The WaPo says there have been 152 mass shootings since 1966. Using the GVA’s much more realistic definition, we’ll get there this year by mid-July. And that’s what mass shootings in the United States are really all about.

 

No Matter Where It Happens, Gun Violence Is Still Gun Violence.

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Like it or not, much of the discussion about gun violence flows over to the issue of race, or more specifically, how racial minorities are disproportionately the victims of violence caused by guns. According to our friends at the Violence Policy Center (VPC), black Americans “are only 13% of the U.S. population, yet represent 50% of homicide victims,” of whom 83% were killed with guns.

Things don’t get any better when we break the numbers down by racial and age groups. In 2016, the leading cause of African-American mortality for men and women ages 15-24 and 25 -34 was homicide, accounting for 42% of all deaths for the 15-24 group, and ‘only’ 26% for the age group 25 to 34. For whites in those some age groups, homicides ranked 7% and 5% respectively for all deaths.

These are terrible numbers, for the most part reflecting the degree to which African-American communities continue to experience the socio-economic manifestations of poverty which divide such populations from everyone else. I recall the shock and dismay when Michael Harrington ‘discovered’ this seemingly-intractable indigence in his classic The Other America, published in 1962. In the more than half century since that time have things really changed?

I think it’s a major step forward when a Parkland kid like David Hogg, who refers to himself as ‘white and privileged’ makes it clear that he wants to speak not just for his classmates but for “all of the people that have died as a result of gun violence and haven’t been covered the same can now be heard.” As terrifying as mass shootings are, let’s not forget that such events add a tiny fraction to the overall gun violence body count, and most of that count are bodies which are young and black.

The purpose of this column, however, is not to advocate for more attention paid to inner-city gun violence, but rather to discuss another aspect of the gun violence issue which is too-often ignored. Because if we are going to concentrate our concerns on what gun violence does to the quality of life and the length of lives in our inner cities, we skip over what gun violence does in communities not of color, but communities where only folks in the majority race tend to live.

Ever been to Wirt County in West Virginia? It covers some 250 square miles of rolling hills and small farms some 40 miles north of Charleston, in 2016 four out of five voters marked their ballots for D.D.D. Trump. The county is home to some 5,800 people, median family income is around $36,000 (the U.S. median is now just under $60,000) and the racial diversity is zero; i.e., it’s all white. In 2014, there were 9 murders in Wirt County, which doesn’t sound like a heckuva lot except on a per-100,000 basis, which is how we figure crime rates, it works out to 155. The last time I checked, the murder rate in gun-happy Philadelphia was 16.

Look at the murders in Wirt County from another point of view. The population density in New York City is 66,000 per square mile, which means that in Manhattan, the average city block is home to roughly 3,300 folks. Put two city blocks together and you have about the same number of people that live in Wirt County. How would you feel if 9 people were murdered in one year on the block where you lived?

In 2016, more than 8,600 white men and women were murdered, three-quarters with guns. But we don’t hear about these killings because they take place in small, dispersed, isolated places like Wirt County, and believe me, there are plenty of Wirt Counties all over the national map.

I’m really hopeful that the Parkland kids will create more pressure on the media to talk not just about the spectacular, rampage shootings, but as well spend more time reporting about the humdrum, one-on-one shootings which happen every day. But let’s just remember to include all the victims of gun violence in those reports.

 

Tom Gabor - A New Approach to Regulating the Most Dangerous Weapons.

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Much has been said of late about the need to ban “assault weapons” (AW) or “weapons of war”. Polls show unprecedented support for a nationwide ban on these weapons.[1] When used in the context of legislation or bills, these terms have been defined in a variety of ways, needlessly offend certain gun owners, and may even serve as impediments to effective laws. In this article, we propose a different approach and one that avoids the pitfalls of previous AW bans as well as bills filed since the mass shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

 

The Problem: Unless one has lived in a cave over the last 20 years or so, it has become apparent that mass shootings have become an increasing concern in the US. The largest massacres have almost always involved the use of weapons like the AR-15 and its relatives in Las Vegas (with the aid of bump stocks), at the Orlando Pulse nightclub, Virginia Tech, Aurora Century Theater, and Sandy Hook Elementary School, as well as in Parkland. One analysis has found that an average of 9 more people are shot and 3 more people are killed in mass shootings in which these weapons or high-capacity magazines (HCM) are used, illustrating the emptiness of the slogan: “Guns don’t kill, people do.”[2]

An analysis conducted for my book, Confronting Gun Violence in America, shows that the number of public mass killings by firearm more than doubled from the 1980s to the 1990s and 2000s.[3] Between 2010 and 2015, the annual number of incidents has again increased sharply, at over four times the frequency observed in the 1980s. More than half of the 30 deadliest mass shootings since 1949 have occurred since 2007. The average number of deaths per year resulting from mass public shootings also has increased and, since 2010, was almost four times that of the 1980s. It is worth noting that the acceleration in the number of large-scale mass shootings occurred following the expiration of the national AWs ban.

 

The increasing annual number of fatalities is especially noteworthy because great strides have been made in the management of bullet wounds over the last 15 years or so due to lessons learned on the battlefields of Afghanistan. Thus, despite higher survival rates, we see an increasing toll from mass shootings, reflecting the greater lethality of weapons and an increasing proportion of victims who incur multiple bullet wounds. This makes sense as we know that there is a growing number of military-style weapons in the civilian market. The gun industry introduced these weapons into the civilian market in the 1980s in response to the saturation of their core market (white, rural males) with conventional firearms.

The Assault Weapons Ban of 1994: The federal AWs ban, in force between 1994 and 2004, prohibited the manufacture, transfer, and possession of those semi-automatic firearms designated as AWs. The weapons subject to the ban were characterized by features (see below) suitable to military and criminal applications rather than sport shooting or self-defense. Over one hundred firearm models, including certain pistols and shotguns, were covered by the ban. The ban also covered HCMs holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition. This aspect of the ban extended beyond designated AWs as it applied to many non-banned weapons that could be equipped with these magazines. At the time the ban took effect, it was estimated that 1.5 million AWs were privately-owned in the US along with about 25 million HCMs.[4] Millions more of the HCM’s manufactured before the ban were imported into the country by 2000.

 

The ban yielded mixed results with regard to its effect on violent crime. While there was no discernible reduction in gun crime or gun homicide, in six major cities—Baltimore, Boston, Miami, St. Louis, Anchorage, and Milwaukee—the share of gun crimes committed with weapons covered by the ban declined by between 17 % and 72 % during the ban. Nationally, traces of guns used in crimes were 70% less likely to involve AWs during the ban. Louis Klarevas, author of Rampage Nation, found that gun massacres, defined as incidents involving six or more fatalities, were nearly cut in half during the ban in comparison with the ten-year period preceding it. In the decade following the ban’s expiration, fatalities again increased dramatically, more than tripling the deaths seen during the ban.[5]

 

The reduction in crime by assault weapons was, in part, offset by the substitution of military-style firearms that technically did not qualify as AWs. Also, during the ban, a study of four cities indicated that guns with HCMs actually rose as semi-automatics were being equipped with them. In addition, the grandfathering provisions of the AWs ban, which allowed weapons and HCMs already manufactured to continue to be sold, undercut its effectiveness. Approximately 25 million of these magazines remained in the country and millions more were available for import from other countries.[6] In fact, manufacturers took advantage of the grandfathering provisions by boosting production of designated AWs in the months leading up to the ban, creating a large stockpile of these items. By contrast, in Australia’s well-known and successful ban, pre-ban weapons were bought back rather than exempted from the ban.

 

The manner in which weapons covered by the ban were defined also undermined its effectiveness. The federal ban and current state laws define “AWs” by their features, some of which are irrelevant to the harm the weapon can produce. Under the 1994 ban, an assault weapon included semi-automatic rifles capable of accepting detachable magazines and possessing two or more of the following features:

  • Folding stocks for concealment and portability;
  • Pistol grip protruding conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon;
  • A bayonet mount;
  • A flash suppressor or threaded barrel designed to accommodate a flash suppressor; or
  • A grenade launcher.

 

Definitions based on these features create a loophole by allowing manufacturers to circumvent the law simply by making minor modifications to a weapon. For example, removing flash suppressors and bayonet mounts makes a weapon no less dangerous but can get around a features-based definition.

 

Overall, the 1994 ban showed some promise but the potential effectiveness was reduced by the grandfathering provisions and the features-based definition of “assault-style” weapons. In addition, those evaluating the law made the point that the ban’s exemption of millions of AWs and HCMs manufactured before the ban meant that the impact of the law would be gradual and would not be fully realized for several years beyond its expiration, especially as HCMs made before the ban kept pouring into the market.[7]

 

A New Approach Focusing on Weapon Lethality: The first AW ban in the US, The Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989, was enacted in California following the massacre of schoolchildren by a drifter who fired 106 rounds of ammunition in three minutes with a semi-automatic military-style weapon. The law defined an AW as one with “a high rate of fire and capacity for firepower that its function as a legitimate sports or recreational firearm is substantially outweighed by the danger that it can be used to kill and injure human beings.” Unfortunately, the law failed to explicitly define such terms as ‘high rate of fire,’ and ‘capacity for firepower”. Instead of defining these terms and banning weapons that met these definitions, the law listed over 50 specific banned guns, and added some cosmetic features (collapsible stock, flash hider, etc.) which have no impact on a gun’s lethality.

When the Federal Government enacted its AW ban in 1994, it borrowed the list of California-banned guns, included the various design features but dropped any reference to lethality; i.e., no mention of ‘high rate of fire’ or ‘capacity for firepower’ at all. This opened the door for gun rights advocates to claim that, functionally, there is no real difference between an AR-15 and any other kind semi-automatic rifle.

To address this void, I propose identifying the most dangerous firearms and regulating them, not on the basis of what they look like but on their ability to kill and injure as many people as possible in the shortest time frame. National gun expert Mike Weisser proposes a method of scoring the lethality of a firearm on the basis of five factors:[8] This system is an objective one which is not influenced by cosmetic modifications intended to circumvent regulations.

  1. Caliber – Larger and faster projectiles tend to cause more damage to human tissue, although the design of bullets and the materials used to make them are also important;
  2. Capacity – The number of cartridges that can be fired without reloading;
  3. Loading mechanism – The speed at which a rifle can be reloaded;
  4. Action - Time required to fire a single cartridge and bring the next cartridge into the breech;
  5. Design flexibility—the ability of a firearm to accommodate accessories, some of which increase lethality (e.g., lasers, electronic aiming devices, fore grips).

Once a scoring system is in place, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) has the expertise and facilities in place to evaluate each firearm on the market and give it a lethality score. This will allow for a classification of firearms on the basis of their lethality, with regulation increasing with the growing lethality of the category in which a firearm belongs. Restrictions that might be considered can vary from complete bans to special licenses and vetting for owners of more lethal weapons, registration requirements, special taxes, longer waiting periods, increasing penalties for noncompliance, and storage requirements for more dangerous weapons. One option for semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 is to regulate them under the National Firearms Act, as is done with fully automatic firearms.

 

Thomas Gabor, Ph.D. is a criminologist, sociologist and author of Confronting Gun Violence in America

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Quinnipiac Poll, February 20, 2018; https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2521

[2] Everytown for Gun Safety, Analysis of Recent Mass Shootings; https://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/everytown-mass-shooting-analysis.pdf

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Violence-America-Thomas-Gabor/dp/331933722X/ref=mt_hardcover?_encoding=UTF8&me=

[4] Christopher S. Koper, America’s experience with the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. In D. Webster and J. Vernick (eds.), Reducing Gun Violence in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, p.161.

 

[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/02/22/the-real-reason-congress-banned-assault-weapons-in-1994-and-why-it-worked/?utm_term=.7aab6b1f3ce5

 

[6] https://www.factcheck.org/2013/02/did-the-1994-assault-weapons-ban-work/

[7] Christopher S. Koper, America’s experience with the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. In D. Webster and J. Vernick (eds.), Reducing Gun Violence in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, p.166.

[8] Mike Weisser, Measuring Gun Lethality; https://mikethegunguy.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/measuring-gun-lethality.pdf

When The 3rd Way Gets It Wrong, They Really Get It Wrong.

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Far be it for the little ol’ gun guy to question the creds or experience of political activists like Jon Cowan and Jim Kessler, but every once in a while, even the self-appointed gurus of the Left get it wrong. And not just a little bit wrong. Completely and totally wrong.

Actually, the Third Way group isn’t really Left, they are…gee, I’m not sure what they are. But they certainly aren’t on the alt-right/white. And they certainly believe that their ‘high-impact advocacy campaigns’ will help liberals figure out what to say and what to do about the important issues of the day. And with all those Parkland kids marching around, what could be more important than gun control today?

What Kessler and Cowan have come up with is the idea that the NRA has never been as panicked as it is right now, that the future for America’s ‘first civil rights organization’ is even more dim, and that the boys from Fairfax are “the most vulnerable they’ve been” in the combined 50 years that the authors of this piece have been “battling” the NRA.

There’s only one little problem. All the facts used to bolster their narrative are true (remember, Third Way is a ‘think tank’ so they only base their arguments on real facts) but these facts are mostly besides the point. Yes, the NRA has lost some contests at the ballot box; yes, their rural base is shrinking; yes, their advocacy magazine has ‘only’ 650,000 subscribers; yes, they joined the rest of the alt-right/white in demonizing the Parkland kids.

But here are some facts that Cowan and Kessler didn’t mention, and the reason they didn’t mention these facts is that for all their combined 50 years of battling Gun-nut Nation, these two guys don’t really know anything about gun-rights organization and they certainly don’t know anything about guns. Which happen to be typical among members of the gun violence prevention (GVP) movement, but since these groups only talk to each other, this lack of knowledge and experience makes no difference at all.

I subscribe to the American Rifleman which, along with American Hunter, are the two NRA magazines which Cowan and Kessler believe aren’t read by the gun-activist crowd. This only proves that neither of them has ever bothered to look at Rifleman or Hunter because they would discover that both contain countless advocacy and activist content, it’s basically the advertising which appeals to a different readership, not what the editorials say. True, the rural base is shrinking and this could affect the electoral landscape after 2022. But what do Cowan and Kessler have to say about the upsurge in concealed-carry (CCW) licenses, most of which are issued to people living in the burbs? Finally, Stinchfield did some Gonzalez-bashing on his NRA television show, but did the NRA say anything after Parkland which remotely resembled Wayne-o’s crazy rant a week after Sandy Hook?

Let me break it gently to Cowan and Kessler: In 1960 Gallup asked Americans how they felt about a ban on handgun ownership. Not restrictive licensing or more regulations – an absolute ban. And 60% of the respondents said it would be a good idea. Know what that number fell to last year? Less than 25 percent!

The fact is (note the use of the word ‘fact’) that a majority of Americans believe that keeping a gun in the home is more a benefit than a risk. And since less than 40% of American homes contain a legal gun, obviously the majority who believe in the positive social utility of personally-owned weapons includes many people who don’t own guns.

This dramatic shift in how we think about guns isn’t the handiwork of the NRA. It’s a function of how American society has evolved and what America thinks and believes about violence, crime and serlf-defense. Until and unless organizations like Third Way acknowledge and understand what this means, casting the NRA as the bogey-man preventing gun control won’t accomplish a thing.

 

 

Gun-nut Nation Better Come Up With A Better Rant Than What Nugent Said.

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If nothing else, the emergence of a national gun-control movement led by a bunch of high school students has not only forced the pro-gun cabal into a defensive mode, but raises the possibility that the NRA’s cherished ‘good guy with a gun’ mantra may finally be running out of steam. And who among the ‘good guys’ has been more vocal in promoting the pro-gun anthem than Ted Nugent, who took a shot at the Parkland kids by calling them ‘mushy-brained children’ who have been ‘fed lies’ by the usual liberal, moneyed types, you know, Soros, Bloomberg, et. al.

After the 2016 election I wondered how alt-right attack dogs like Palin, Nugent, Loesch, Hannity, Rush and Coulter would adjust to defending, rather than verbally assaulting the status quo. Because no matter how many times Schmuck-o Trump pretends he’s ‘cleaning the swamp,’ he now represents the Beltway crowd and he can only survive by making deals which means giving up something for everything he gets. And don’t think the NRA and their noisemakers aren’t sitting in Fairfax wondering what they’ll do if the Congress turns blue later this year and Trump has to strike some kind of deal over guns.

I happen to think that Ted Nugent is a genius when it comes to writing lyrics for his songs. I also think he’s pretty smart for having figured out how to sustain a musical career by occasionally saying extreme and crazy things that other artists and public figures would never dare say. Am I accusing Ted of using his celebrity status to promote himself both on and off-stage? He’s certainly not the only entertainer to mix politics and show-biz by appealing to a following that will respond to both. After all, Joan Baez just announced a new concert tour by spending several days with ‘more than two hundred Indian tribes who have gathered to oppose the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline.’

I hate to break it to Ted, but if the best he can come up with for criticizing the Parkland kids is the idea that they are being ‘fed lies’ by the gun-grabbing crowd, he won’t get much traction from this rant. Because what makes this moment so different from every previous effort to use a rampage shooting to spread the gun-control gospel is that Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg don’t have a friend in the Oval Office on whom they can lean. And there’s an old rule in military strategy which says you can’t come up with an effective way to deal with the enemy unless the enemy is right in the middle of your sights.

When Wayne-o went on national television a week after Sandy Hook and blabbed on and on about ‘good guys with guns,’ he wasn’t trying to besmirch the parents from Newtown, he was reminding the faithful that these parents had been invited to the White House by Gun-Grabber Number One. But what can the boys from Fairfax say when the guy whose political campaign cost them thirty million sits there respectfully listening to the Parkland kids and then issues a statement commending these same kids for their ‘courage’ in marching against guns?

When Schmuck-o Trump showed up at the 2016 NRA show I knew right then that the NRA might have made a tremendous mistake. Because you don’t spend eight years selling the idea that ‘gun rights’ can only be threatened by a liberal President when the guy you decide to back has a long history of being less than enamored about guns.

I’m not saying that Trump wasn’t a clear alternative to Hillary who would have made a new gun law a priority if she had won the gold ring. What I am saying is that the Gun-nut Gang and its acolytes like Ted Nugent better come up with a narrative that goes beyond accusing some high school students of being ‘dupes’ or ‘pawns’ in the national debate about guns. Because if nothing else, these kids witnessed first-hand a rampage shooting, and for all his tough talk, Motor City Ted’s career can’t compete with that.

Wishing Everyone a Peaceful and Joyous Easter!

 

 

No Matter Why You Use A Gun, It’s Still Gun Violence.

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Yesterday I wrote a column pointing out that for the very first time in my lifetime (and I was born in 1944,) the gun-control movement finds itself on a level playing field with the other side. If anything, the field may even be tilted a bit in the favor of gun control. Why do I say that? Because it’s pretty hard to convince the mainstream that these high school kids from Parkland are just a bunch of dupes being fed this lie and that lie by the Bloomberg-Soros cabal.

Just about everyone who is a parent knows the one thing you can’t tell a teenager is to follow the advice of his or her elders unless it’s advice they really want to hear. And let’s remember one other thing about these Parkland kids – they are veterans of a rampage assault, it really happened to them. And for all her blather and nonsense about how she’s always armed to protect herself and her loved ones from any kind of a threat, Dana Loesch has never, never found herself in a real-life situation where she actually used that gun.

We are now at the point when the gun-control community needs to come up with an argument that will convince mainstream Americans that the ‘good gal with a gun’ narrative isn’t a legitimate response to armed threats. And with all due respect to my public health researcher friends, most people really don’t make up their minds because of evidence-based research. As Daniel Kahneman has explained it, decisions about what to do both for the important and the unimportant things in life flow as much or more from emotions as from facts.

The scenes pictured above are where gun killings have occurred. The picture on the left is Skidmore, MO, in front of the saloon where the town bully, Ken McElroy, was shot down by several gun-wielding local residents while the rest of the townsfolk stood and watched. The picture on the right is Union Street in Springfield, MA, where someone is gunned down at least once a month.

Law enforcement spent six years trying to get someone in Skidmore to identify the killers of Ken McElroy, but nobody ever did. The cops in Springfield will tell you that what happens on Union Street is just a gang killing, and when they walk around looking for witnesses, nobody saw nuttin’, even when the shooting takes place at mid-day.

The murder of Ken McElroy is something we call ‘virtuous violence;’ i.e., using violence for positive ends. After all, McElroy got what was coming to him, and what better way to even the score than to use a gun? On the other hand, the gang member who shot another gang member on Union Street is also committing an act of virtuous violence - the guy he shot may have welched on a drug deal, or may have tried to shake down a friend, or break into a neighbor’s house.

Murder is overwhelmingly an event that occurs between individuals who have some degree of connection to each other before the killing occurs. Whether the connection is between people who live in the same small town or who hang out on the same corner makes no difference at all. To quote the brilliant Lester Adelson: “With its peculiar lethality, a gun converts a spat into a slaying and a quarrel into a killing.”

When the NRA talks about how ‘good guys with guns’ will protect us from ‘bad guys with guns,’ what the boys from Fairfax are really saying is that violence is the most effective way to respond to violence, and nothing could be further from the truth. If the gun-control movement wants to convince mainstream America that gun violence should not be an everyday affair, they need to address the issue of virtuous violence and argue that violence in any form, used for redressing any real or imagined threat, is a type of behavior which does not work.