It’s Time To Stop Debating About Gun Violence. Period.

June 22, 2024

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Happens every time. All you need is one good shooting, Barack says a few words about how we need to do something to end gun violence, and we are treated to the nonsense about how there is no gun violence. That they happen to use a gun to kill either themselves or someone else 31,000 times a year, oh well, it’s a small price to pay for the fact that all those armed citizens are walking around and protecting us from millions of crimes each year.

And what’s the response from people who sincerely want to see gun violence brought under control? Please don’t misunderstand us – we’re not against the 2nd Amendment, we’re just for some sensible gun laws. And I’d be the first one to sit down with the NRA or one of their sycophantic mouthpieces like John Lott to come up with some reasonable solutions to the problem. But the other side isn’t interested in reasonable solutions because there’s no problem. And if you want proof that gun violence in America isn’t a problem, all you have to do is compare our gun violence rate to rates in other countries, particularly gun violence that takes the form of mass shootings, and you’ll quickly understand that we are, in fact, a very non-violent country after all.

Best gun salesman ever!

Best gun salesman ever!

The CDC first listed gun violence as a public health issue in 1981, and it has made the yearly CDC list ever since. Remember who was President in 1981? A guy named Reagan who remains the most iconic figure for the Conservative movement, which also happens to be the pro-gun movement, notwithstanding the fact that Reagan signed a major piece of gun-control legislation while he was Governor of California, and also later came out explicitly against hi-cap magazines in the run-up to the assault rifle ban in 1994. But in those days you could be a Conservative and still be in favor of sensible gun controls. That was then and this is now.

And now means that when the President says something, anything about guns, the media immediately goes out to solicit a response from the other side, meaning the self-appointed guardians of American exceptionalism as exemplified by the 2nd Amendment and the Confederate flag. Not that a single, Republican presidential candidate is willing to say what the residents of South Carolina should do about the stars and bars, but they’re sure willing to tell everyone what we should do about guns, which is that we should do nothing at all. So what do we end up with? Not an informed and intelligent debate about gun violence, but a spectacle that is so stupid and senseless that we really shouldn’t be having a debate at all.

Here’s how dumb it gets. John Lott goes on a conservative radio show and immediately labels Barack’s comment about our ‘unique’ propensity for mass shootings to be “bizarre.” And what’s his proof that the President got it all wrong? He pulls the 2011 Norway shooting which killed 67 people out of his hat. But there’s only one problem which neither he nor his talk-show host bothered to mention, namely, that the attack at a summer camp on Utoya Island was the only mass shooting that occurred in Norway between 2000 and 2014, while over the same period the U.S. experienced at least more than 130 mass shootings that claimed nearly 500 lives.

I think it’s time for my friends in the gun-sense movement, or the gun-safety movement, or whatever they are calling themselves these days to declare a moratorium on debates over whether we have a gun violence problem after all. Because as long as we continue to be seduced by the notion that both sides deserve ‘equal time,’ what we are going to get is not an argument against reasonable gun controls, but an argument against any kind of gun controls. And since that argument has nothing to do with facts, it’s an argument that you just can’t win.

Want To Bet Against Background Checks? You Might Lose.

May 13, 2024

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Score another win for the gun-sense team. On Monday the Governor of Oregon, Kate Brown, signed into law a bill that basically requires background checks for all gun transfers in the state. The measure is similar to the I-594 initiative that now requires universal background checks in neighboring Washington State. So now, with a few exceptions, anyone living on the West Coast between Canada and Mexico must undergo the NICS background check process in order to buy, sell, or transfer a gun.

I wouldn’t necessarily take the short odds against background checks becoming law of the land, if only because although we usually think our country was settled east to west, in fact much of our culture has moved west to east. California was already settled by Spanish conquistadores and their descendants while Virginia, Massachusetts and the other colonies were still largely woods, and much of our modern culture first appeared on the West Coast in the form of movies and tv. I first heard of ‘health food’ when I went from New York to teach at Berkeley in 1976. And let’s not forget where Starbucks got started, ditto Ronald Reagan and the ‘modern conservative movement’ along with half-and-half.

nics I have no issue with the notion that background checks keep guns out of the ‘wrong hands.’ I also don’t believe the nonsense thrown around by so-called 2nd-Amendment ‘absolutists’ that background checks are a violation of their constitutional rights. But we shouldn’t just assume that because the FBI says that slightly more than 1 million NICS transactions have been denied since the system became operational in 1998 that this somehow translates into one million guns being kept away from the ‘wrong hands,’ which means kept away from people who will use those guns to commit violence and crimes.

We really don’t know why violent crime rates, particularly gun crime rates, have dropped by 50% over the last twenty years. And because we don’t know why this has occurred, it’s not clear that any of the solutions, including background checks, will result in gun violence dropping any more. I’m not suggesting that we should stop strengthening gun regulations just because, to parrot the NRA, criminals don’t obey laws. If we used criminal response to laws as a criteria for judging the effectiveness of our legal codes, we would never pass a single statute at all. What I am suggesting is that if we continue to define gun violence as a preventable public health issue, which is how we have been defining it since 1981, we should set realistic goals for reductions in gun violence and use these goals to judge the effectiveness of the policies and strategies that are espoused.

In fact, the CDC has adopted what they believe to be realistic goals for reductions in gun violence over the next five years. These goals call for a 10% reduction by 2020 in gun homicides, non-fatal shootings and children bringing guns into schools. I think the time has come for activists who are working to end gun violence to sit down, en masse, and figure out whether the CDC numbers are realistic, or need to be adjusted, or need to be replaced by a different set of criteria and a different set of goals. And the gun industry should be invited to participate in this discussion as well.

The gun industry used to count on the fact that the upsurge in concern about gun violence which followed every high-profile shooting would quickly run its course. Frankly, I thought the groundswell provoked by Sandy Hook would be over by the time the first anniversary of the tragedy rolled around. But recent events in Washington State and Oregon have proven me wrong. And when it comes to public health policies, things have a way of taking on a momentum and a life of their own. As I said early on, I wouldn’t take the short odds against more gun regulations down the line.

 

 

America Goes To War And Takes Its Guns

June 25, 2024

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Most of the design and engineering advances that created modern small arms came through the development of military weapons, both rifles like the Springfield 03 or handguns like John Browning’s Colt 1911. And whether it was the M-1 Garand that General Patton called the “greatest battle implement ever devised,” or the Winchester repeating carbine that the U.S. Cavalry carried against the Indians, it’s safe to say that guns played an important role in just about every war that America fought.

It should therefore come as no surprise that guns are once again playing an essential, if not a pivotal role in what is perhaps America’s longest-lasting war. I’m not talking about Iraq or Afghanistan, although both of those conflicts have dragged on far too long. I’m talking instead about America’s “culture” war for which guns and gun ownership have come to define both the ebb and flow of the conflict as well as the basic attitudes of both sides.

Guns were first tied to the culture war when Charlton Heston became NRA President in 1998. Heston and other members of his Hollywood generation began turning conservative when Ronald Reagan, won the Presidency in 1980. But while Reagan boosted conservative fortunes he was always ambivalent about the culture war; kept evangelicals at arm’s length, was never seen inside a church, and rarely, if ever, invoked the virtues and values of gun ownership or membership in the NRA. In fact, along with Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, Reagan sent a letter to the House of Representatives in 1994 advocating an assault-rifle ban that was enacted later in the year.

Until the 2008 election of Obama, the culture war embraced issues like abortion and gay rights, both of which took precedence over guns. And even though Bill Clinton blamed the 1994 Republican Congressional sweep and the 2000 defeat of Al Gore on the power of the NRA, the outcome of both elections couldn’t be tied specifically to anything having to do with guns.

The ascendency of guns in the cultural war didn’t reflect so much the growing power of the gun-owning lobby as it was the result of conservative shifts away from other issues for which they simply could not muster enough votes to win. On abortion, for example, the nation appears evenly split but Rowe v. Wade is now forty years old and as women continue to move forward in the workplace and the professions, a woman’s right to choose seems fairly secure. As for the gay issue, 19 states have now legalized same-sex marriage and last year the SCOTUS invalidated the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act which opens the door for many more states to lift their own gay marriage bans.

sarah So as the older, hot-button cultural issues gradually wither away (remember something called English as the official language?), gun ownership and gun “rights” move to center stage. And guns are a perfect means to build support for conservative cultural warriors because their ownership, after all, is enshrined in the most holy of all cultural holies, the Bill of Rights. Even the leader of the liberals, whether he means it or not, is forced to sing hosannas to the 2nd Amendment as his shock-troops prepare to do battle against the other side.

The problem with cultural conflicts is they cannot be resolved with reference to facts. Because as Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky pointed out long before the culture war rose to the level of conflict that we see today, people make decisions about things like gun ownership not because they understand or even care about whether a gun can or cannot protect them from harm, but whether ownership of a gun either supports or conflicts with their world view. If both sides in the gun debate don’t find a way to resolve their arguments by reconciling larger cultural issues, it will drag on the way the Chaco War dragged on between Paraguay and Bolivia over a border that neither country could even find.

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