Bang, Bang

Bang, Bang

    Guns.  It's time we talked about them without walking around as if we're stepping on glass.  Rather than being a taboo subject, the reality is that guns are everywhere; and here in the U.S., everywhere means virtually every single home (as of the latest count, estimated gun ownership was enough for roughly one gun in every home).  As of a few years ago, the number of people being killed every day due to guns (8 of them children) was averaging 360...and obtaining a gun in the U.S. is as easy as attending a gun show (a regular event in the U.S.) or answering an ad;  in many cases, there's no need for a name or an address, just hand over the cash and get your gun...or rifle...or assault weapon.  Registering your weapon?  In the U.S., there are indeed some background checks due to such laws as the Brady Law but they are very limited*, and once again, efforts to expand their influence have been defeated by Congress (no new gun laws since 2008), despite all of the recent violence and mass shootings in schools and parking lots (the U.S. has four times more mass shootings than any other country).

    So the big question around much of the rest of the world is...why?  What is this obsession with guns, for it's one thing to be able to have a gun in the home for self defense (this is the common argument that owning a gun is a Constitutional right as defended --and in some cases won in the Supreme Court-- by the National Rifle Association, a powerful lobbying group that holds tremendous sway with the U.S. Congress), but many states (including mine) now allow guns to be openly displayed (or concealed, if one prefers), and carried into schools, shopping malls and churches (many school districts here now offer a special handgun training class for teachers in schools).  And unlike the common perception, the owners of guns are of both sexes, something my wife and I discovered many years ago when we had some friends over and I moved their purses into the closet (our dog was a puppy at the time and into chewing most anything left on the floor).  "Your purses are really heavy," I told them, joking about them maybe winning big in Las Vegas. "Oh, it's our guns," they said.

    Whatever your views on gun ownership, how would you react to unexpectedly discovering that two female friends of yours were now toting loaded weapons, and that  those weapons were now in your house?  Is the ownership of guns due to an increased "fear" of criminal break ins or violence?  The truth is, as an article in The Atlantic pointed out, Americans have never been safer...but that is statistically and physically, and apparently not mentally: The violent-crime rate (which excludes homicides) has declined by more than 70 percent since the early 1990s.  The homicide rate has declined by half, and in 2011 it reached the lowest level since 1963.  According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, between 1995 and 2010 the rate of rape and sexual assault fell from five per 1,000 females to two...And how do Americans celebrate this extraordinary success?  By denying it.  Every year Gallup asks whether crime has gone up or down since the previous year.  Every year, rain or shine, the public insists, usually by overwhelming margins (63 percent to 21 percent in 2014), that crime has risen.  “Most Americans Unaware of Big Crime Drop Since 1990s,” announced the Pew Research Center in 2013; only 10 percent of those surveyed knew that gun crimes had gone down since the 1990s.   Criminologists say that many people get angry when told that crime is decreasing.

    Still, it would appear that "mass" killings, often defined as the killing of 4 or more people in one shooting, are on the rise.  According to The Week: A recent Harvard University analysis that combined FBI data with other statistics concluded that since 2011, the frequency of mass attacks has tripled...Under a broader definition including all shooting deaths of four or more people, USA Today counted 346 mass shootings over a 17-year period, with 1,697 victims — about 20 a year.  A still broader definition used by ShootingTracker, a crowdsourced website, counts all attacks in which four or more people are shot, whether or not they're killed.  In the first 239 days of this year, the site recorded 249 mass shootings.  "It's a bigger problem today than it was a decade ago, and it may be a bigger problem in the future," said University of Alabama criminal justice professor Adam Lankford, who just completed a study on mass shootings.

    In Australia, the answer to stopping mass gun killings was to ban semiautomatic weapons, buying them back (about 20% of assault weapon owners complied) and imposing a 28-day waiting period as well as a background check.  That was 20 years ago.  Australia has not had a mass killing since (although an editorial in the U.K.'s Guardian reported that the gun lobby is actively at work there to repeal the restrictions).  The response by U.S. reporter Mark Wright in NationalReview.com..."That. Is. Not. Going. To. Happen."  Indeed, gun manufacturers in the U.S. doubled their production of guns between 2009 and 2013 (making nearly 11 million new guns annually), even as sales dropped (down 12% in 2014).

    So it was a surprise to see the conservative business magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, headline on its cover, Stop the NRA...but upon looking closer, the fine print slipped between the lines actually read, Stop "Picking On" the NRA.  Earlier editorials in the magazine have pointed out: For two decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been prohibited by Congress from using funds to “advocate or promote gun control.” (The National Institutes of Health faces a similar restriction.) Now there are signs the medical profession is getting fed up.  In the April 7 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine is an editorial calling on physicians to demand the “resources and freedom” to do their jobs: reducing harm. Specifically, the journal calls for an end to the political blockade on research about the health effects of gun violence.  

    And yet, "smart" gun technology is here, such as the iP1 by Armatix which uses a mechatronic lock system: The so-called blocking device serves as the basis for all retrofit-friendly locking systems from Armatix.  The mechatronic assembly is made up of high-precision mechanical components and an electronic controller.  The size of the blocking device corresponds exactly to the caliber of the weapon it is to secure..The process is completed within fractions of a second and is irreversible without the appropriate authorization.  The gun is secured in the gun itself.  Using this type of safety mechanism, weapons can be stored or transported together with the ammunition – it is impossible to load a cartridge in this secure state!  Yet as an article in Fortune noted, the history of getting such locking technology to market in the U.S. has been quite difficult: Smart guns also played a cameo role in a massive litigation assault on the gun industry, patterned on the tobacco litigation.  From 1998 to 2000 more than 30 municipalities sued the manufacturers seeking reimbursement of medical expenses for treating gunshot victims, and asking for reforms relating to gun distribution and design, including smart-gun technology.  By 2000 the Clinton administration was threatening to pile on with its own suit against the industry...That March, Smith & Wesson settled.  Or, rather, tried to.  It signed a deal with the White House, agreeing to a long list of reforms.  Among other things, it would dedicate 2% of annual revenue to develop “authorized user technology,” which it would install “in all new firearm models within 36 months.”...Both the NSSF and the NRA caustically denounced S&W, with the NSSF asserting that it had “violated a trust with [its] consumers and with the entire domestic firearms industry.”...Other gun groups called for a boycott, and S&W was struck with a whopper.  Sales fell sharply, two factories were temporarily shut down, and 125 of the 725 employees at its Springfield plant were laid off. S&W began backing away from the deal almost immediately, and when George W. Bush won the presidential election that November, the agreement collapsed.  The following May, Tomkins, which had paid $112 million to buy the company in 1987, sold it for just $15 million, plus debt absorption...By that time, the two manufacturers that had been pursuing smart guns most avidly—Colt’s and iGun—had each shelved their projects.

    Recently in Austin, Texas,  AK-47-carrying activists rallied at the Capitol and confronted one of the representatives whose county is against openly carrying handguns.  The next day, the legislature voted to make it less expensive for politicians to install panic buttons inside their offices.  Despite one representative saying that that was "a level of aggression we're not used to seeing," one has to wonder what they would have to fear, especially when another Texas representative said, "It's not up to the government to tell us how to carry our guns."  Still, it was sad to read this story from Newsweek and The Week about an incident in Tennessee: An 11-year-old boy was charged with first-degree murder this week after allegedly killing his 8-year-old neighbor with a shotgun during a dispute over her puppy.  MaKayla Dyer was playing with friends outside the unnamed boy's mobile home when she and the boy got into an argument through his bedroom window.  When the boy asked to see Dyer's dog and she refused, he allegedly took his father's 12-gauge single-shot shotgun from an unlocked closet and shot MaKayla in the chest.  "He asked the little girl to see her puppies," said Chasity Arwood, a neighbor.  "She said no and laughed and then turned around, looked at her friend and said, 'Let's go get the--' and never got "puppies' out." 

    Mentally ill?  Revenge or anger?  Too easy an access to guns?  The questions are many and the answers few.  A letter from Harvard School of Public Health writes that suicides by guns are twice the number of homicides by guns.  A friend of mine took his own life in this manner; and all of us, from family on down, asked whether he would have done so had he not had so easy an access to a handgun.  Stab yourself?  Hang yourself?  Taking a life, even your own, is seemingly made easier with a gun.  Which is not to pass judgement on the many responsible gun owners, from long-time hunters to commonsense citizens.  Indeed, some of my friends are retired police officers and present some of the most down to earth arguments for gun ownership (and a majority of them never fired --or had to fire-- their weapon in all their years of work). 

    So the debate goes on...again.  But I am reminded of a PBS special on a nuclear aircraft carrier, with the camera crew going around and asking each department who was most essential to the operation of the ship.  The top gun flyers rated themselves the most valuable, saying that there would be no need for the carrier if they didn't have the pilots.  Down at the kitchen, the chefs pounded away at the thousands of meals being made and said that without them, none of the crews would survive.  But it was when the camera crew made it all the way to the men who loaded the jets with the bombs and bullets that they heard, "Armaments.  Without us there'd be no need for any of this."

    From bullets to guns to the people who own and use them.  The chicken or the egg.  Like a hot potato, the blame for a shooting keeps going around and around.  But as Nicholas Kristof wrote in The New York Times, the process of reform with guns might be as slow as the safety features now so prevalent in automobiles.  But he added: ...the numbers are unarguable: fewer than 1.4 million war deaths since 1775, more than half in the Civil War, versus about 1.45 million gun deaths since 1970 (including suicides, murders and accidents)...If that doesn’t make you flinch, consider this: In America, more preschoolers are shot dead each year (82 in 2013) than police officers are in the line of duty (27 in 2013), according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI...A poll this year  found that majorities even of gun-owners favor universal background checks; tighter regulation of gun dealers; safe storage requirements in homes; and a 10-year prohibition on possessing guns for anyone convicted of domestic violence, assault or similar offenses...The gun lobby argues that the problem isn’t firearms; it’s crazy people. Yes, America’s mental health system is a disgrace. But to me, it seems that we’re all crazy if we as a country can’t take modest steps to reduce the carnage that leaves America resembling a battlefield.

*This from Wikipedia regarding the effectiveness of the Brady Law: From the inception of the NICS (National Instant Criminal Background Check System) system in 1998 through 2014, more than 202 million Brady background checks have been conducted. During this period approximately 1.2 million attempted firearm purchases were blocked by the Brady background check system, or about 0.5% percent.  The most common reason for denials are previous felony convictions...Prosecution and conviction of violators of the Brady Act, however, is extremely rare.  During the first 17 months of the Act, only seven individuals were convicted. In the first year of the Act, 250 cases were referred for prosecution and 217 of them were rejected.