Guns and Weapons Articles







1. Weapons and Civilization
2. Why The South Loves Guns
3. Australia's Example
4. Regulate The Bullets
5. The Massacre That Didn't Happen
6. Why Is America An Outlier?
7. The Real Stats
8. The Constitution
9. Stephen King
10. Correlation
11. Ego Trip?
12. Fake Arguments?
13. Toddlers Kill More Than Terrorists
14. Guns and Suicide
15. A Doctor Speaks
16. Changing the Conversation
17. Britain
18. Need More Guns
19. Kalashnikov's Gun
20. The Science (Skeptic: Michael Shermer)
21. The Science: Reader Response
22. 20 Kids A Day
23. NRA and Craven Politicians
24. Fark and The Onion
25. Guns Kill Kids
26. Skeptoid On Stats
27. Bill Gates Takes On The NRA
28. Toys Are Regulated But Not Guns
29. Gun Deaths Exceed Car Deaths 2015
30. Blocking The Path To Suicide
31. GOP Hypocrisy
32. The ‘exceptionally American’ problem of mass shootings
33. Compulsory Gun Insurance
34. Study Gun Violence?
35. Gun Free Society
36. The 'Good Guy With A Gun" Myth
37. 2-year-old shooter
38. N.R.A

Weapons and Civilization

  • From the very first spear to nuclear bombs, deadly weapons have directed the course of our cultural evolution.

    IT'S about 2 metres long, made of tough spruce wood and carved into a sharp point at one end. The widest part, and hence its centre of gravity, is in the front third, suggesting it was thrown like a javelin. At 400,000 years old, this is the world's oldest spear. And, according to a provocative theory, on its carved length rests nothing less than the foundation of human civilisation as we know it, including democracy, class divisions and the modern nation state.

    At the heart of this theory is a simple idea: the invention of weapons that could kill at a distance meant that power became uncoupled from physical strength. Even the puniest subordinate could now kill an alpha male, with the right weapon and a reasonable aim. Those who wanted power were forced to obtain it by other means - persuasion, cunning, charm - and so began the drive for the cognitive attributes that make us human. "In short, 400,000 years of evolution in the presence of lethal weapons gave rise to Homo sapiens," says Herbert Gintis, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico who studies the evolution of social complexity and cooperation.

    The puzzle of how humans became civilised has received new impetus from studies of the evolution of social organisation in other primates. These challenge the long-held view that political structure is a purely cultural phenomenon, suggesting that genes play a role too. If they do, the fact that we alone of all the apes have built highly complex societies becomes even more intriguing. Earlier this year, an independent institute called the Ernst Strungmann Forum assembled a group of scientists in Frankfurt, Germany, to discuss how this complexity came about. Hot debate centred on the possibility that, at pivotal points in history, advances in lethal weapons technology drove human societies to evolve in new directions.

    The idea that weapons have catalysed social change came to the fore three decades ago, when British anthropologist James Woodburn spent time with the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. Their lifestyle, which has not changed in millennia, is thought to closely resemble that of our Stone Age ancestors, and Woodburn observed that they are fiercely egalitarian. Although the Hadza people include individuals who take a lead in different arenas, no one person has overriding authority. They also have mechanisms for keeping their leaders from growing too powerful - not least, the threat that a bully could be ambushed or killed in his sleep. The hunting weapon, Woodburn suggested, acts as an equaliser.

    Some years later, anthropologist Christopher Boehm at the University of Southern California pointed out that the social organisation of our closest primate relative, the chimpanzee, is very different. They live in hierarchical, mixed-sex groups in which the alpha male controls access to food and females. In his 2000 book, Hierarchy in the Forest, Boehm proposed that egalitarianism arose in early hominin societies as a result of the reversal of this strength-based dominance hierarchy - made possible, in part, by projectile weapons. However, in reviving Woodburn's idea, Boehm also emphasised the genetic heritage that we share with chimps. "We are prone to the formation of hierarchies, but also prone to form alliances in order to keep from being ruled too harshly or arbitrarily," he says. At the Strungmann forum, Gintis argued that this inherent tension accounts for much of human history, right up to the present day.

    Egalitarian tendencies

    Boehm's belief that we have inclinations towards both hierarchical and egalitarian social structures is strengthened by research published last year by Susanne Shultz at the University of Oxford and colleagues. They looked at the social structures and genetic relatedness of 217 living primate species. Their analysis revealed a range of organisations from solitary living to complex social structures, and showed that the closer two species were genetically, the greater the similarity between their social structures (Nature, vol 479, p 219).

    If our ancestors were once hierarchical like chimps, how did they develop a different political structure? Gintis sees the transition to group living as the watershed, because it allowed primates to cooperate to share large animal kills. Species of Australopithecus that lived 3 or 4 million years ago were probably scavengers, but they may have thrown stones to chase off predators. "We know that australopithecines aggregated stones and moved them about," he says.

    At some point, hominins took up hunting and invented weapons that could kill from afar. The world's oldest spear was found by archaeologist Hartmut Thieme in an opencast mine in Germany in the 1990s, along with two others like it, as well as horse, elephant and deer remains. However, it is possible that such weapons were produced far earlier than 400,000 years ago, because the archaeological record is patchy and wood perishes easily.

    Whenever it occurred, the invention of projectile weapons influenced the evolution of our ancestors. The upper body of chimps is adapted for swinging through trees. Throwing requires a different organisation of the torso, arm and hand, along with the brain circuitry that underpins coordination of arm movements, adaptations that were selected in our ancestors. Throwing skill became the defining human characteristic, evolutionary biologist Paul Bingham and psychologist Joanne Souza of Stony Brook University in New York argue in their 2009 book, Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe. They place throwing on a par with the cheetah's capacity to run, and believe that it made social cooperation inevitable: once humans could kill from a distance, no individual could rule by strength alone.

    Without an alpha male imposing order, our ancestors needed new behaviour to ensure social cohesion. Studies of modern egalitarian societies indicate that a key development was the emergence of strict social norms, including the punishment of "free riders". The Turkana, nomadic cattle herders in East Africa, lack a centralised government yet can successfully raise large raiding parties of warriors who are not kin and often do not even know each other. Sarah Mathew at Stony Brook University and Robert Boyd at Arizona State University in Tempe found that the Turkana produce this cohesion, at least in part, by punishing cowardice and desertion with public floggings and fines (PNAS, vol 108, p 11375).

    Cooperate or die

    So, group living begat hunting, hunting spurred the development of weapons technology, and new weapons overthrew the alpha male and led to the emergence of cooperative tendencies. It's a neat story, but are lethal weapons really necessary to explain the transition from hierarchies based on brute strength to egalitarian living? At the forum, Carel van Schaik, who directs the University of Zurich's anthropology institute in Switzerland, noted that in hunter-gatherer societies, individuals are extremely reliant on one another, especially if they become ill or cannot provide food for themselves for any reason. "Because of this interdependence, you just can't afford to be too bossy," he said.

    Perhaps, then, early hunter-gatherer societies had to be egalitarian simply to survive. This possibility is weakened by recent discoveries about how chimps behave in the wild. Like our ancestors, they hunt collectively, share meat and care for their sick. But the one thing they do not do is wield lethal projectile weapons. Although chimps have been known to use stone tools, to crack nuts for example, they cannot throw them with any precision. And they continue to live in hierarchies dominated by beefy alpha males.

    Whatever allowed our ancestors to break free of hierarchical rule, egalitarianism proved remarkably successful, lasting for hundreds of thousands of years. Then, about 10,000 years ago, there was another massive political upheaval. The immediate catalyst was the invention of farming, and the increased trade it allowed. The result was a change in the way weapons were deployed. "As soon as you get accumulated wealth," says Gintis, "then individuals can monopolise that wealth and incentivise others to protect them." This led to a new kind of hierarchy dominated by a "Big Man" who did not need to be physically strong, just rich enough to pay a small cabal of armed and trusted subordinates to protect him.

    In this way, human societies entered an age of rampant despotism. Those at the top exploited those lower down - making slaves of them, demanding taxes and so on. But they also protected them from outsiders, so the system was stable for as long as the threat of the enemy outweighed the inhumanity of the exploitation. Less stable, however, was the fate of despots, relying as it did on the risky strategy of buying the loyalty of others. "They didn't often die in their sleep, let's put it that way," says Gintis.

    Such wealth-based hierarchies were the seeds of the modern state. And from small beginnings, these proto-states grew, spurred at least in part by another innovation in weapons technology. Horses were domesticated about 5500 years ago, but it wasn't until about 1000 BC that nomads on the Eurasian steppes learned how to sit on them and how to control them. Now men were able to shoot iron-tipped arrows from small, powerful bows while mounted. The combination of horse and armed rider, according to Peter Turchin at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, was arguably the first weapon of mass destruction.

    The first WMD

    "This technology dramatically increased the scale of warfare, making it much more offensive," Turchin told the forum. To improve their chances of survival, groups under threat coalesced into larger, more defendable societies. Turchin even suggests that today's major religions emerged at around this time, in response to the need to create social cohesion between disparate ethnic groups. "These religions allowed sociality to break through the barriers of ethnicity," he said. The nation state was born, and its weapon of choice was the cavalryman.

    With so much firepower now available, you might expect this to have been a bloody phase of human civilisation. In fact, the opposite is true, says Samuel Bowles, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute. His calculations, based on archaeological and ethnographic data, suggest that even in the 20th century - the "century of total war", as it has been called - warfare accounted for about 5 per cent of mortality in Europe, just half that for Stone Age Europeans and today's egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies (Science, vol 324, p 1293). The nation state proved particularly good at winning wars and protecting people, he concludes, and that explains why it has been the dominant social model for the past 500 years.

    If despotic, power-based hierarchies worked so well, what caused latter-day Big Men to cede some of that power in the form of democracy? Again, it was a response to new lethal weapons, says Gintis. Starting with the invention of the flintlock musket in the 17th century, handgun technology evolved until, by the early 20th century, armed foot soldiers finally had the edge over cavalry. In other words, guns had put power back into the hands of the masses. Now leaders were reliant for their protection on a sector of society that was disenfranchised and potentially disgruntled. If Gintis is correct, extending the vote to most of the population was the price the elite paid to buy their support.

    This pattern continues today, says Bingham. Democratisation tends to go hand in hand with the citizens of a country gaining access to weapons, usually handguns, and thereby breaking the state's monopoly on coercive threat. Another modern technology has also helped our anti-hierarchical tendencies get the upper hand. The challenge, just as it was millions of years ago, is to coordinate the majority, which is why real-time social media have become powerful drivers for democracy - as the Arab Spring showed. "Even armed merely with stones and other simple weapons, large, well-coordinated majorities have significant coercive clout," says Bingham.

    The gradual elimination of despots has been one of the major political trends of the past century. So are we headed for universal democracy? Gintis believes there is no room for complacency. Torn as humans are between hierarchical and anti-hierarchical instincts, open societies will always be threatened by the forces of despotism. Boehm agrees. "It boils down to whether a government can establish fear, rather than consensus, as its basis," he says. "And with humans, this will always be up for grabs."

    To democracy and beyond

    If innovations in weapons technology have driven the emergence of civilisation (see main story), the obvious question is, what next?

    The past 70 years have seen the rise of the megaweapon, including nuclear, biological and now cyberweapons. According to Paul Bingham and Joanne Souza of Stony Brook University, New York, these have enforced a kind of crude democracy between nations, giving coalitions of states a credible threat to help keep "rogue" states in check. "There is no other route to global cooperation than precisely this kind of coercive equilibrium. Nor will there ever be in the future," Bingham says.

    Because democratic states tend to be wealthier than authoritarian ones, they can afford more megaweapons, which explains why internationally the coercive push has been away from autocracy, towards democracy. Within a state, however, megaweapons offer no one sector of society any power over another, so they have little effect on social structure. At the national level, it is individual weapons - and guns in particular - that influence the balance of power. According to Bingham and Souza, the more successfully a state's security bodies monopolise access to guns, the more authoritarian that state will be. That's why they argue that democracy begins with the democratisation of arms.

    In the future, however, a new advance in weapons technology could set civilisation on a novel track. "A technology could easily arise that irremediably places democracy on the defensive," says Herbert Gintis at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. He gives the example of an implant with the capacity to inflict pain on, or gather information about, an implanted individual. Such technology is already conceivable, he says. How it might influence the future of human social organisation is not.

Why the South Loves Guns

    Southerners worship firearms as the ultimate anti-government symbol - which is why they will never accept gun control, no matter how many children die.

    Since hideous, unspeakable gun massacres are such a regular occurrence in this country, I've had the several opportunities to live the cycle of horror, outrage, argument, recrimination, and inaction that engulfs the Internet each time. It usually goes something like this: I share a couple of links in the heat of the moment, and dissenters - many of them Southern friends and relatives - come out of the woodwork to debate. The responses are as predictable as my anti-gun links: "guns don't kill, people do"; "if someone had had a gun, maybe they could have stopped this"; "more guns make people safer"; "taking guns away from law-abiding people means only criminals will have guns."


    No matter how I attempt to rebut these empty slogans, they never lose their power. On Friday, the horror of imagining small children gunned down in their classrooms with an assault rifle, the images of their parents screaming in despair, didn't seem to do one bit to persuade any of the usual suspects that maybe citizens having unlimited access to assault weapons isn't the best idea. It was sobering: the desperate denial, the contorted excuses. I spent most of the day wondering, if this won't change people's minds, will anything?

    Having grown up in rural Texas, I shouldn't be surprised that gun violence has virtually no impact on people's thinking about weapons there. People live side-by-side with guns every day. Handling guns, either for hunting or pleasure shooting, is a part of the excitement of growing up: you learn to shoot, you learn to always put the safety on, and always stand behind the barrel. You shoot animals and watch them die and it's no big deal. Guns are so ubiquitous that people don't even realize the risk they take any time they handle one, or the extreme danger to their children in an environment of such casualness about them. When tragic accidents and horrific crimes happen, people grieve, but never does anyone blame the guns. They should have been locked up better, and so-and-so's kids should have been taught never to play with them.

    I would wager most people in my hometown are unaware that the South is, many times over, more violent than any other part of America. Within a span of a few years in my childhood, a hairdresser at the salon where my parents took me to get haircuts was gunned down at her workplace on the town square, in the middle of the day. A few years later, one of my dad's coworkers was shot to death on his own property by an assassin hired by his crazy ex-wife. Almost every time I return and pick up the local newspaper, I'm surprised by the violent gun crimes that occur in a relatively well-off town of less than 5,000 people. You would think that such an experience of gun violence would turn people against them, but no, it's just a fact of life. Most of us from the South are only a generation or two away from people who remember the days of sheriffs and outlaws, when the ability to defend one's family was a necessity for survival. Those days have passed, but people are still powerfully shaped by the memory of them.

    Looking at the conservative response through that lens, you can see the outlines of a worldview, one where people feel that it's the personal duty of individual citizens to deal with problems, or to save innocent victims from gun violence. It's as if 'government' and 'law enforcement' are not even concepts; sure, maybe we have those institutions around for some reason, but what happens in society is fundamentally our responsibility. At its best, this spirit is what outsiders admire about America; at its worst, it can be reflexive, irrational opposition to anything that looks like collective problem-solving. In my experience, Southerners tend to fall on the latter end of the spectrum, and meet tragedies like Newtown with bizarre blanket declarations about the impossibility of doing anything to stop future massacres. People intend their staunch defense of gun rights as an expression of their belief in personal responsibility and self-reliance; in practice, it is a profoundly fatalistic surrender to violence and the imagined requirements of surviving it.

    This acceptance of violence is, of course, not limited to the South. Every time a gun massacre dominates the headlines, gun sales spike, indicating a significant number of Americans believe that somehow, owning a gun will protect them. A journalist friend in East Texas told me the day after the Aurora theater shooting in July, her phone rang all day long with people asking how to get concealed-carry permits. I've heard it over and over, from friends and relatives, expressing what sometimes seems like the universal response of rural America: The good people need to be armed so they can protect us from the bad people.

    This contrasts sharply with the facts of public policy, where the efficacy of more restrictive gun controls is not a matter of debate. The United States' lax gun laws indisputably, beyond a shadow of a doubt, lead to more gun deaths. The statistics comparing the U.S. to other Western nations with tighter gun laws are staggering: the number of Americans who die in gun accidents in a given year is routinely many times higher than the total gun deaths in the U.K. In Britain in 2008, there were 39 gun murders; in the U.S. in 2009, there were 9,146 - that's right, even adjusted for our larger population, the American rate is 47 times higher. Japan's recent gun bans have virtually eliminated gun murder in their country. In our country, the states with the strictest gun laws have the lowest rates of gun crime.

    But none of this matters when guns serve as a powerful cultural signifier for Americans, in the South and elsewhere, of their self-reliance and independence from government. It makes no difference whether gun bans, as a matter of fact, drastically reduce gun deaths. It makes no difference that it's extremely unlikely that the presence of an armed person would have stopped any of the massacres that have seized the headlines the past few years. It makes no difference that there is no reason whatsoever for a private citizen to own an assault weapon. The pragmatic logic of public policy is no match for the power of a cultural sensibility that has made guns a deep ideological attachment. A few thousand civilian deaths seem insignificant against the imaginary scenario of totalitarian government turning on its disarmed citizens.

    If I could appeal directly to the objectors who populate my social media feeds, I would beg them to understand that such a scenario is a fantasy. The idea of a dictatorial American state disarming its citizens is a paranoid delusion. Updating our gun laws does not necessarily mean banning guns, and it almost certainly does not mean confiscating them. There is a reasonable case to be made for the place of concealed-carry permits in a sensible gun policy. Making it more difficult for troubled teenagers to order assault rifles on the Internet has nothing to do with undermining personal responsibility or taking away someone's cultural identity. The only thing there is to lose is the experience of children being murdered in cold blood, over and over and over again.

Australia's Example

    On April 28, 1996, a gunman opened fire on tourists in a seaside resort in Port Arthur, Tasmania. By the time he was finished, he had killed 35 people and wounded 23 more. It was the worst mass murder in Australia's history.

    Twelve days later, Australia's government did something remarkable. Led by newly elected conservative Prime Minister John Howard, it announced a bipartisan deal with state and local governments to enact sweeping gun-control measures. A decade and a half hence, the results of these policy changes are clear: They worked really, really well.

    At the heart of the push was a massive buyback of more than 600,000 semi-automatic shotguns and rifles, or about one-fifth of all firearms in circulation in Australia. The country's new gun laws prohibited private sales, required that all weapons be individually registered to their owners, and required that gun buyers present a genuine reason for needing each weapon at the time of the purchase. (Self-defense did not count.) In the wake of the tragedy, polls showed public support for these measures at upwards of 90 percent.

    What happened next has been the subject of several academic studies. Violent crime and gun-related deaths did not come to an end in Australia, of course. But as the Washington Post's Wonkblog pointed out in August, homicides by firearm plunged 59 percent between 1995 and 2006, with no corresponding increase in non-firearm-related homicides. The drop in suicides by gun was even steeper: 65 percent. Studies found a close correlation between the sharp declines and the gun buybacks. Robberies involving a firearm also dropped significantly. Meanwhile, home invasions did not increase, contrary to fears that firearm ownership is needed to deter such crimes. But here's the most stunning statistic. In the decade before the Port Arthur massacre, there had been 11 mass shootings in the country. There hasn't been a single one in Australia since.

    There have been some contrarian studies about the decrease in gun violence in Australia, including a 2006 paper that argued the decline in gun-related homicides after Port Arthur was simply a continuation of trends already under way. But that paper's methodology has been discredited, which is not surprising when you consider that its authors were affiliated with pro-gun groups. Other reports from gun advocates have similarly cherry-picked anecdotal evidence or presented outright fabrications in attempting to make the case that Australia's more-restrictive laws didn't work. Those are effectively refuted by findings from peer-reviewed papers, which note that the rate of decrease in gun-related deaths more than doubled following the gun buyback, and that states with the highest buyback rates showed the steepest declines. A 2011 Harvard summary of the research concluded that, at the time the laws were passed in 1996, it would have been difficult to imagine more compelling future evidence of a beneficial effect.

    Whether the same policies would work as well in the United States - or whether similar legislation would have any chance of being passed here in the first place - is an open question. Howard, the conservative leader behind the Australian reforms, wrote an op-ed in an Australian paper after visiting the United States in the wake of the Aurora shootings. He came away convinced that America needed to change its gun laws, but lamented its lack of will to do so.

    There is more to this than merely the lobbying strength of the National Rifle Association and the proximity of the November presidential election. It is hard to believe that their reaction would have been any different if the murders in Aurora had taken place immediately after the election of either Obama or Romney. So deeply embedded is the gun culture of the US, that millions of law-abiding, Americans truly believe that it is safer to own a gun, based on the chilling logic that because there are so many guns in circulation, one's own weapon is needed for self-protection. To put it another way, the situation is so far gone there can be no turning back.

    That's certainly how things looked after the Aurora shooting. But after Sandy Hook, with the nation shocked and groping for answers once again, I wonder if Americans are still so sure that we have nothing to learn from Australia's example.

Regulate The Bullets

    In the era of 3D-printed guns, ammunition may prove a better regulatory target than the weapons themselves.

    Defense Distributed hopes to create a shareable digital pattern that would allow anyone with a 3D printer to build his own gun. Download the pattern, send it to print, and within minutes you have a working firearm. No background check, no waiting period. While an initial test suggested that printed guns are still somewhat flimsy, this is an initial prototype that will be refined even as the adoption of 3D printers -- the "Cube" is only $1299 -- increases. "How do governments behave," Defense Distributed asks, "if they must one day operate on the assumption that any and every citizen has near instant access to a firearm through the Internet?"

    Within the United States, the question has already been asked and answered: it gives up on gun violence. It sees mass shootings and weapons-related deaths that dwarf every other country. The United States is so saturated with guns that seeking to control them is futile. People own and use guns made in the early 1800s; guns made last month are on sale in stores now. We have a centuries-old accumulation of armaments that shows no sign of evaporating.

    But there are two things that are needed for a gun to work: the gun and the ammunition. Limiting guns may be hopeless. So why don't we focus on the bullets?

    People have made their own guns for a long time. A ZIP gun, a crude device used in prisons and by street gangs, can be cobbled together with only a little more effort than Defense Distributed's plastic offering. A gun can be made from any number of common household objects. But making bullets is much, much trickier. A bullet needs much more specific consideration of materials and weight and requires something that is much harder to come by: a propellant. You can make your own gunpowder, of course, but refining the process to create effective munitions is as tricky as building a simple bomb. Doable, but dangerous.

    Were the government to limit the amount of ammunition made and sold in the United States, there would still be an awful lot available. James Holmes bought 6,000 rounds online before his shooting spree in Aurora, Colorado. Bullets are so easy to come by that it's clear that huge stockpiles exist throughout the country. But unlike guns, bullets are single use. You fire a bullet, you expend its propellant. While attempts to remove guns from the streets would either be incalculably slow or require heavy-handed, dangerous government action, curbing the ability to buy ammunition would mean a natural reduction of the arsenal that remains. Every time a bullet is fired, that bullet is lost forever.

    Perhaps the best argument in favor of limiting ammunition, though, is this. The mantra of firearms advocates is the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which reads:

    A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

    It doesn't say a single thing about the right to own bullets. At the time of the adoption of the Constitution, bullets were largely inert slugs, loaded into flint-lock muskets propelled with loose gunpowder packed into the muzzle. There was no need to assure the right to ammunition, which may be the loophole the government needs to dramatically curtail the scourge of gun violence.

    Bear all the arms you want. Make your own at home. Without a bullet to fire from it -- or, at the very least, far, far fewer bullets -- we can achieve what the Founding Fathers really sought: a stable, secure nation.

The Massacre That Didn't Happen

    It was the Connecticut school massacre that never happened.

    A 16-year-old junior was stockpiling guns in his bedroom closet for an attack on April 10, 2007. In a red folder on his nightstand, he kept a map of his high school in the town of Newington, a hit list of more than 20 classmates, a timeline of a killing plan that ended with his own suicide, and photos of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris of Columbine infamy.

    But Frank Fechteler never had the chance to carry out his plot; a girl had caught word of the planned attack and told her parents and the police.

    Rampages such as the one this month at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., invariably raise the question of how the shooters might have been identified in time to prevent their deadly assaults.

    There is no psychological profile specific enough to pinpoint school shooters in advance. But one common thread may offer the best opportunity to intercept them: They tend to be indiscreet during their planning stages. The difference between a tragedy and a tragedy averted, experts say, is often somebody who knows something deciding to speak up.

    Ironically, the security measures instituted by many schools after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado may discourage students from sharing potentially life-saving information. Metal detectors, cameras, increased police presence and indiscriminate disciplinary policies, at their worst, can create a culture of mistrust and silence, researchers said.

    "Kids are less likely to come forward if they perceive an authoritarian stance," said Eric Madfis, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Washington branch in Tacoma.

    It is unclear whether Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old loner who killed 20 first-graders and seven adults before turning a gun on himself, had revealed his plans to anybody. There is little research on whether adult mass murderers are prone to what criminologists refer to as "leakage."

    But a 2004 report by the U.S. Secret Service and the Department of Education found that teenage shooters tend to talk.

    The study examined 37 attacks on schools dating to 1974. In 81% of those cases, at least one other person - typically a friend, classmate or sibling - had some prior knowledge of the event. In 59% of the cases, more than one person knew.

    In a follow-up report, bystanders who had remained silent told researchers that they worried about adults overreacting if the information turned out to be wrong.

    Killing schemes have been revealed after the plotters unsuccessfully tried to recruit other students, bragged about their plans or warned friends to stay home on a particular day.

    Fechteler's 2007 plot against Newington High School in Connecticut was broken up two months before he was to carry it out.

    The unidentified girl who spoke up testified in a sworn affidavit that a boy she knew and his friend "Frank" had been talking about an attack on the school since December 2006. After the boy sent her links to YouTube videos of Fechteler shooting rifles and setting off explosives, she felt threatened enough to tell her parents.

    Fechteler, who had no history as a troublemaker, pleaded guilty to making threats and a bomb and was sentenced to three years in prison.

    Psychologists can characterize rampage shooters only in broad terms.

    The typical perpetrator is a white male who lives in a tightknit suburb or rural area, where life can be especially difficult for people who don't fit in. He has been bullied. He suffers from depression or another psychiatric disorder and is deeply frustrated with his life, blaming others for his miseries. He begins planning his crimes after a loss that feels catastrophic - a job or a girlfriend, for instance.

    And he has easy access to semiautomatic firearms.

    While that description is accurate, it's not very useful.

    "There are hundreds of thousands of students who fit the profile of the school shooter and wouldn't hurt anybody," said Jack Levin, a Northeastern University sociologist and criminologist who studies mass murder.

    One reason the description is so broad is that school shootings are rare. More Americans are struck by lightning each year than killed in rampage shootings.

    The number of mass murders - defined by the FBI as having at least four victims - has been stable over the last three decades at about 20 attacks and 100 to 150 victims a year, Levin said. The widespread perception of a rise comes from the media attention the killings receive, he said.

    Thwarted school plots, though barely studied, are more common.

    Madfis identified 195 foiled plots between 2000 and 2009. He said he found no instances in which cameras or metal detectors made a difference. When plots were broken up, it was most frequently because students told authorities, he concluded in a detailed study of 11 incidents.

    But in several prominent attacks, a "code of silence" among students allowed attackers to follow through on their plans.

    In 2001, a 16-year-old used his father's .22-caliber revolver to kill two classmates and injure 13 others at Santana High School in Santee, Calif. As many as 20 students knew about his plan, investigators found. One broke down in tears in a radio interview, saying he felt responsible for the shooting because he had failed to alert authorities.

    In Pearl, Miss., in 1997, a 16-year-old stabbed his mother to death at home, drove to his high school and shot and killed two students and injured seven others. He had told some friends to stay home that day, but none of them warned the school.

    "There is a teen culture of anti-snitching," said Jeff Daniels, an expert on school violence at West Virginia University.

    He and other researchers said that culture was reinforced by "zero tolerance" disciplinary policies, which have led to students being expelled for making idle threats or bringing a water pistol to school. The sense of disproportionate punishment discourages students from sharing information.

    Whether students perceive the school climate as fair, democratic and cohesive is by far the most important factor in whether they share information, several studies have concluded.

    Simple measures can be surprisingly effective in building trust between students and adults.

    One district in California began requiring each teacher, administrator, janitor and cafeteria worker to strike up a conversation with a student between each class period, said Marisa Randazzo, a threat assessment expert who has studied school shootings for the U.S. Secret Service. The school staff learned about pregnancies, drug use and domestic violence - and opened channels of communication that could head off violence.

Why Is America An Outlier?


    Though the issue has been largely on the political backburner for the last four years, last week's tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut has already prompted a new push for gun control laws by the Obama administration and congressional Democrats. The president suggested in his speech in Newtown on Sunday that he would use "whatever power this office holds" to prevent similar events from happening in the future, and White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Tuesday that the White House would consider supporting congressional proposals for "common sense gun control measures like the assault weapons ban." (Even the National Rifle Association has pledged to make "meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again.")

    Such a push is likely to meet stiff resistance from Second Amendment advocates. But even if it passed, the United States would still be a major outlier when it comes to gun ownership and culture. As the following facts and figures from around the world make clear, when it comes to the right to bear arms, the Land of the Free is in a league of its own.

    The stockpile of civilian-owned guns in the United States dwarfs all other countries

    According to the 2007 Small Arms Survey -- the best, most recent study of the number of guns available in the world -- civilians in the United States own roughly 270 million small arms, which is more than the next 17 countries combined (the runner-up on the list is India, with 46 million firearms. The rate of ownership in the United States -- 90 firearms per 100 people -- is also the world's highest (again the runner-up, Yemen, is a distant second with 60 firearms per 100 people). The report notes that there are around 650 million civilian-owned firearms in the entire world, which means more than 40 percent of these are in the United States, and that about 4.5 million out of the roughly 8 million new firearms manufactured annually are purchased in the United States. Keep in mind that the United States represents less than five percent of the world's population.

    "Children in other industrialized nations are not dying from guns"

    Gun violence is killing and injuring American children at an astoundingly high rate. In the United States, only car crashes and cancer claim the lives of more children between the ages of 5 and 14 than firearms, according to a 2002 study that appeared in the Journal of Trauma-Injury, Infection, and Critical Care. "Children in other industrialized nations are not dying from guns," the authors wrote. "Compared with children 5-14 years old in other industrialized nations, the firearm-related homicide rate in the United States is 17 times higher, the firearm-related suicide rate 10 times higher, and the unintentional firearm-related death rate 9 times higher. Overall, before a child in the United States reaches 15 years of age, he or she is 5 times more likely than a child in the rest of the industrialized world to be murdered, 2 times as likely to commit suicide and 12 times more likely to die a firearm-related death."

    The investigators also found a clear link between elevated levels of guns and child mortality rates across U.S. states, suggesting that more guns lead to more child deaths not only across international borders but also across the United States. Critically, the authors concluded that children living in states with large numbers of guns were not more likely to be victims of violence or suicide that did not involve firearms. Instead, the presence of guns makes possible a kind of violence that few young people could inflict on themselves or one another otherwise.

    In no other developed country do as many people die in gun-related homicides than in the United States. According to statistics compiled by the United Nations, 3.2 out of 100,000 Americans were killed by guns in 2010. As a frame of reference, consider that Japan, a country with one of the world's most notorious mafias, the yakuza, has virtually eliminated gun-related homicides.

    Of all the countries in the world, Honduras has the highest gun-related homicide rate, with 68.4 deaths for every 100,000 people. But Honduras, like its fellow Latin American countries Colombia (27.1 gun-related deaths for every 100,000 people) and Mexico (10 per 100,000 people), has been engaged in a brutal drug war against well-funded and well-armed cartels and gangs. These factors are not at play in the United States, which is vastly richer and has a significantly more effective state apparatus.

    The United States is nearly alone in enshrining gun rights in its Constitution (sort of)

    The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, in full, reads: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Over time, this amendment has been interpreted as guaranteeing individuals the right to possess a wide variety of firearms and, in many cases, to be able to carry those guns concealed on one's person or openly in a hip holster. U.S. courts have repeatedly upheld that interpretation, most recently in the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller. In a 5-4 ruling, the justices struck down Washington, D.C.'s ban on handguns and rejected the notion that the Second Amendment permits individual gun ownership only for those participating in a "well regulated militia."

    It is important to note that critics of the Heller ruling argue that it applies a distorted reading of the Second Amendment that deliberately removes the text from the context of its drafting. Many historians claim that the amendment was drafted in response to British efforts to disarm unhappy colonists, and that the maintenance of private arms was seen as an integral part of preserving the ability to muster a militia. In this reading, the Second Amendment does not protect the individual right to bear arms.


    The Heller ruling places the United States within a decidedly small club of nations -- alongside Guatemala, Haiti, and Mexico -- that guarantee the right to bear arms in their constitutions. According to the United Nations, these countries also experience relatively high rates of firearm-related homicides. While data is unavailable for Haiti, the United States and Mexico both saw around 10,000 gun deaths in 2010, while Guatemala, a significantly smaller country with only 15 million people, witnessed 5,000 gun deaths. If easy access to guns is supposed to guarantee safety and reduce gun violence, the experiences of these countries simply don't support that theory.

The Real Stats

    Those of us - (like that radical, Michael Bloomberg) who are further along on this than the President is, and wish to see America make minimal gestures toward doing about guns what every other civilized country has already done with no diminishment to their liberty - may finally feel some hope. The emergence of Bloomberg as the leader on this issue is in itself stirring: where laissez-faire billionaires with solid records on civic safety go, how many moderates can stay behind?

    Two clarifying points, at the risk of repetition: one, that we know, as certainly as one can know anything in the social sphere, that gun control works to reduce and eventually eliminate gun violence. Common sense tells us that this is so; we need only look at the world outside America and see how other countries, at least as 'rugged' as our own, with histories just as frontier-filled, have dealt with gun violence by legislating to control guns - and how little gun violence they have as a result. (The right-wing Australian politician John Howard contributed a piece to the Times this morning outlining just this truth.) We have thousands of gun deaths - eighty-four teens and children are among the nine hundred slaughtered by guns in the blink of an eye since the Newtown massacre - while the other countries that most closely resemble our own, from Australia to Canada to Britain, have something close to none. All that separates us from other lands is our guns and the deaths they cause.

    And, despite the attempts of the death lobby to silence them, the American social sciences speak just as clearly to the issue. As the social scientist Matthew Miller was quoted as saying in Slate, "Our firearm homicide rate is an order of magnitude higher than in these other countries. Our rates of homicides with non-gun mechanisms - knives, bats, whatever - is pretty much right where they are in other high income countries." And the work of Harvard's David Hemenway is the one to cite, if only for its lapidary conclusions: "Across high-income nations, more guns = more homicide." "Across states, more guns = more homicide." These are as robust as any correlations in all of the social sciences. All the absurd attempts to use statistics to lie about this truth can't change that fact.

    (My mordantly favorite bit of misdirection is the claim that since Scotland, post-Dunblane, essentially banned private ownership of guns, gun homicide has increased. Why, it's almost doubled in the past two years alone! What does this mean? Oh, yes: guns were involved in five killings in all of Scotland in a span from 2011 to 2012, compared with three in the previous year.)

    Anyone who says that there is anything unsettled or unknown or unclear about the relation between gun control and gun violence is either lying or ignorant, or both. Many things in our social life are complicated and multivalent; this one is not. Guns do not protect people, or families. Any anecdote that can be mined to claim that they do - and many of those stories evaporate on probing - is overwhelmed hundreds of times over by the number of well-documented accidents, suicides, and domestic disputes turned into murderous occasions produced by the presence of a gun at homes.

    A gun turns a drunken dispute into a bloody death. As Arthur Kellermann writes in the New England Journal of Medicine: Given the number of victims allegedly being saved with guns, it would seem natural to conclude that owning a gun substantially reduces your chances of being murdered. Yet a careful, case-control study of homicide in the home found that a gun in the home was associated with an increased rather than a reduced risk of homicide.

    Then there is the claim that we need guns to fight an encroaching, tyrannical government. There has not once been a tyrannical government demanding armed opposition since we got rid of the British. There was, however, a rather famous occasion when armed radicals used their guns to attempt to destroy the democratically elected government in order to preserve their right to treat their fellow humans as property. The right to keep weapons in order to commit violent sedition has not, since 1865, really been widely regarded as a central American liberty.

    The acts that the President outlined may have been small, and, of course, the assault-weapons ban, leaky and hobbled and inadequate even as the last one was, may not even be renewed. But in certain sense it doesn't matter: we know now that even the smallest barriers can have big results. Every act we attempt that lames and hobbles the easy availability of guns helps. The aim, after all, is not perfection; it is simply to make it very hard, rather than very easy, for crazy people bent on homicide to get their hands on weapons that make mass killing trivial for them. Making violence hard makes it rare.

    If one needs more hope, one can find it in the history of the parallel fight against drunk driving. When that began, using alcohol and then driving was regarded as a trivial or a forgivable offense. Thanks to the efforts of MADD and the other groups, drunk driving became socially verboten, and then highly regulated, with some states now having strong ignition interlock laws that keep drunks from even turning the key. Drunk driving has diminished, we're told, by as much as ten per cent per year in some recent years. Along with the necessary, and liberty-limiting, changes in seat-belt enforcement and the like, car culture altered. The result? The number of roadway fatalities in 2011 was the lowest since 1949. If we can do with maniacs and guns what we have already done with drunks and cars, we'd be doing fine. These are hard fights, but they can be won.

The Constitution

    The next time you play airport security theater - remove shoes, display laptop, toss water bottle - think of the children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Think of the moviegoers in Aurora, Colo., the citizens in Tucson peaceably assembled to meet with Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the worshippers at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis., and Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old Chicago girl killed by gunfire days after coming to Washington with her high school band for President Obama's second inauguration.

    "Unfortunately, what happened to Hadiya is not unique," Obama said in Chicago on Feb. 15. "It's not unique to Chicago. It's not unique to this country. Too many of our children are being taken away from us."

    These victims were casualties of domestic battles. Most died from wounds inflicted by military-style weapons designed to kill large numbers quickly.

    Then ponder this: Americans suffer assaults on their privacy - they are groped in public and wiretapped en masse - and surrender their constitutional protections against unwarranted searches in the name of the war on terror, yet they cannot muster the will to protect children from mass murder with military-style weapons. We have spent more than $1 trillion on homeland security since Sept. 11, 2001, yet have withheld annual funding of less than $3 million for research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on gun violence.

    Why are the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments subject to erosion in the name of homeland security, but the Second Amendment is beyond compromise in the name of saving innocent lives?

    The risks of terrorism are not so much greater than the risks of gun violence that a disproportionate response is justified. Between 1969 and 2009, according to a 2011 Heritage Foundation study, 5,586 people were killed in terrorist attacks against the United States or its interests abroad. By comparison, about 30,000 people were killed by guns in the United States every year between 1986 and 2010. This means that about five times as many Americans are killed every year by guns than have been killed in terrorist attacks since Richard Nixon took office.

    The Transportation Security Administration has an annual budget of about $8 billion and has spent about $60 billion on aviation security since 2001. The TSA employs about 62,000 people, of whom 47,000 are airport screeners.

    The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives - the principal federal agency charged with regulating the gun industry - has a budget of about $1.2 billion. It employs roughly 5,000 workers, about half of whom are special agents charged with carrying out criminal investigations.

    These huge allocations turn the reality of risk on its head. In the nine years after 2001, 340 people were killed and 267 injured in attacks on civil aviation worldwide.

    Our perception of the relative dangers of terrorism and gun violence is distorted. We don't know it, and our leaders don't bother to tell us. Indeed, they conspire with the gun industry to hide it.

    Beyond immediate danger, humans are poor judges of risk - witness texting drivers and iPod-entranced jaywalkers. Yet, with education, risk perception can change. We've altered risk perceptions about smoking, unprotected sex, seat-belt use and the need for police to wear body armor. These changes were driven by fact-based research and clear advice on how to lower risk.

    Americans needed no further evidence of the risk of terrorism than the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. President George W. Bush standing on the twin towers' rubble with a bullhorn sparked a national consensus about what to do. That consensus has been sustained by a vast, federally funded security industry that extends even into academia. The Department of Homeland Security's Center for Homeland Defense and Security lists 375 colleges and universities that offer homeland security programs. Platoons of security experts from the industry and its academic branch continually warn us in seminars and congressional hearings of the need to keep the money flowing.

    The greater risk of gun violence is masked. The media report lavishly on mass shootings but often fail to cover the much higher number of Americans killed and injured in gun violence daily. In Chicago last month, Obama said that 443 people were killed by guns in that city in 2012, and 65 of them were children - "a Newtown every four months." Every day, about 80 Americans die from gunshots and about twice as many suffer nonfatal injuries, often lifelong debilitations. I researched a week of U.S. news stories about gun violence in August 2011 and then compared them with CDC averages; I found that about eight times more gun deaths and 60 times more gun injuries occurred than were reported.

    The gun industry and the National Rifle Association have shut down federal information sources. Until Obama changed the policy by executive order in January, the CDC was forbidden to research gun violence under a law passed in 1996. In 2003, the ATF was forbidden to release summary data from millions of crime-gun traces. We value ignorance over knowledge of a threat that takes more lives than terrorism many times over. Congress and two presidents - Bill Clinton and George W. Bush - have presided over this flight from fact. It has been politically safer to pander to the visceral fear of terrorism than to stand up to the gun industry.

    Hopefully, this is changing. While Congress muddles along its familiar, shameful path of rhetoric and preemptive surrender - Republican legislators recently voiced their opposition to keeping records of gun sales - Obama has clearly articulated the fundamental causes of U.S. gun violence. By taking the issue to the American people, he may get the support of the majority who want real change. A Johns Hopkins poll released in January showed that 89 percent of Americans wanted to require background checks for all firearms sales; more than 80 percent wanted to prevent high-risk individuals, including people who have violated restraining orders, from owning guns; 69 percent wanted to ban sales of semiautomatic assault weapons; and 68 percent wanted to prohibit the sale of large-capacity ammunition magazines.

    If we are to protect the homeland, we must also protect our children and all innocent citizens from the epidemic of violence inflicted by military-style guns.

Stephen King

    In the wake of Sandy Hook, I wrote an essay called 'Guns,' and published it as a Kindle Single - an e-book, in other words - because I wanted to be a part of the discussion before the whole subject slipped from the consciousness (and consciences) of the American people. It has a way of doing that, you know; the National Rifle Association counts on it.

    What I asked for in that piece - what I almost begged for - was that we Americans find some middle ground on the subject of heavy-duty firearms. Just a small median strip of rationality between the honking freeway lanes jammed with those on the political right and the political left. According to polls, the majority of Americans would really like a place like that, where a rational discussion could be held without raised voices.

    I pointed out that I'm dead against repeal of the Second Amendment, since I'm a gun owner myself. I also pointed out that a deer hunter who feels it necessary to go into the woods armed with a 30-round AR-15 must either have poor aim or is afraid the deer are going to fight back. I refused to go on any of the cable news programs - both those on the right that would have been happy to attack me or the ones on the left that would have been delighted to praise me.

    The response to that essay has been strong but, in many ways, depressing. There have been more than 1,300 capsule reviews on the Amazon website. A thousand have been favorable (834 five-star reviews, 205 four-star reviews). More than 200 have been unfavorable (160 one-star reviews, 49 two-star reviews). In the middle, the place I really wanted to reach, less than 90. If you need a statistical example of how polarized the country is, there it is.

    We've got two vocal political blocs in the United States right now, and all they do is yell at each other. Not only about guns, either. It's the debt, it's abortion, it's immigration reform, it's entitlements like Medicare and Social Security, it's foreign policy, it's Obama (the bum) and John Boehner (the bum). My God, we've got people still arguing over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and whether or not the president is an American citizen. Sometimes I wish they'd all just grow up, shut up and go about the business of helping their fellow men and women.

    Here's another depressing factoid: Most of the five-star reviews of 'Guns' are marked 'Amazon Verified Purchase,' which means the reviewer actually bought the download and (presumably) read it. That's the case with very few of the one-star reviews, suggesting that the reviewers either read excerpts in a newspaper article or didn't read it at all. There are assertions that my facts are wrong but little in the way of backing evidence.

    What there seems to be in the one-stars is an all-encompassing anger and the irrational belief that I want Americans stripped of their guns. That is simply not true (nor would it be feasible). I argued for three things: universal background checks, a ban on the retail sale of semi-auto assault rifles geared to fire large magazines of ammunition and a ban on mags holding more than 10 rounds. Everyone else keeps their deer rifles, shotguns, revolvers and automatic pistols. All I want is to make it a little more difficult for the Adam Lanzas and James Seevakumarans to kill unarmed civilians and innocent children. Why in the name of God should that be controversial?

    Many of my anti-fans are also mad about where my share of the proceeds from 'Guns' is going. One of them, a Mr. or Ms. C. Henderson, writes, "All of this is a way for Stephen King to...give money to an organization... whose avowed purpose is to strip Americans of their Second Amendment rights."

    Mr. or Ms. Henderson seems to have missed the fact that the organization in question is the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, not the Brady Campaign to Repeal the Second Amendment. Stop with the paranoia, please. The BC's mission statement simply says, "We are devoted to creating an America free from gun violence, where all Americans are safe at home, at work, and in our communities." That's a lot different from saying, "We are devoted to creating an America free from guns."

    Look, most Americans want these simple laws, so let's make them. If they run counter to the Second Amendment, the Supreme Court will eventually overturn them. If they stand (they probably will), the hunters can still hunt, the target shooters can still shoot, and homeowners can still have a weapon or two at hand for defense and protection. The rest of us will be a little safer.

    There are no guarantees in life; nothing's a lock. I think we all understand that. You can outlaw AR-15s, but you can't outlaw crazy. The next Adam Lanza is out there somewhere, the next Seung-Hui Cho, the next James Holmes. The job we all have, as responsible Americans, is to make it as hard for these loonies as possible.

    Can we at least find a middle ground on that?

Correlation

    Well, to paraphrase a great Republican, here we go again. The details of Adam Lanza's home environment - the armory of weapons there, the copy of the NRA Guide to the Basics of Pistol Shooting, there was a useful book kept close - are scarcely out before the insistence that there's nothing, absolutely nothing, to see or to do returns, at a higher volume. The President talks, in his calm and conciliatory tones, about minimal gun control - that there's no threat to responsible gun owners, just common sense - and gets, in return, no response, no counterproposal at all, just the usual toxic cocktail of fatalism and scorn. And he gets contemptuous references to his merely 'emotional appeals' on the issue, to his talk, on Thursday, of 'shame on us.' As though the horror of children ripped apart by a hundred and fifty-four bullets fired in less than five minutes is not itself rational evidence for change, as though unbearable parental grief is not itself an argument for altering the circumstance that made the mourning happen.

    Then there is the "Well, we don't really know what works!" faction, shrugging off talk of even those minimal measures. You know, there really isn't much evidence that gun control reduces gun violence. The good and worthy David Brooks - whose role in life, unfortunately, seems to be to try to put a rational face on an irrational political faction - advises in a column that since gun deaths didn't really end with the last, brief, assault-weapons ban, we shouldn't press for another, at least not too hard.

    Actually, it's hard to find a more robust correlation in the social sciences than the one between gun laws and gun violence. The cry comes back: "But those are just correlations. They don't prove causes!" And, indeed, the most recent damning study, published in that cranky, left-wing rag the Journal of the American Medical Association - which shows a clear correlation, state to state, between strong gun laws and less gun violence - ends with the orthodox injunction that the study could not alone determine cause-and-effect relationships, and that further studies are needed.

    But when a scientific study ends by stating that there's uncertainty about whether a correlation proves a cause, it doesn't mean that correlations are meaningless in every circumstance. Everyone knows that creating false correlations between two unrelated elements is easy. But it can be that a correlation is so powerful and reliable that it may actually point to that rare thing in the social sciences, a demonstrable causal relation. As a wise man once said, "Correlation is not causation, but it sure is a hint." When you can separate out a truly robust correlation between two elements in our social life, it's a big deal.

    What makes a correlation causal? Well, it should be robust, showing up all over the place, across many states and nations; it should exclude some other correlation that might be causing the same thing; and, ideally, there ought to be some kind of proposed mechanism that would explain why one element affects the other. There's a strong correlation between vaccines and less childhood disease, for instance, and a simple biological mechanism of induced immunity to explain it. The correlation between gun possession and gun violence - or, alternately, between gun control and stopping gun violence - is one of the most robust that you can find. And the mechanism that connects weak gun laws to gun murders and massacres is self-evident: with guns around, ordinary arguments escalate into ones where someone gets killed, and crazy kids who dream of getting even with the world can easily find a gun - or, like Adam Lanza, many guns - to do it with.

    One sign of the robustness of the correlation is that the counterarguments are either easily explodable pseudo-science or stories that people tell each other on Internet forums. "If he'd had a knife, he'd use that!" - well, yes, he would have, and the kids In Newtown would be alive today. In response to real social science, with its cautious but solid correlations, you get obscene, Tarantino-style fantasies - "If the kindergarten teacher had had an assault weapon of her own, loaded, primed, and ready to fire, this wouldn't have happened!" - and stray tabloid anecdotes - "I heard about this woman, she had a gun, and the marauders just saw it and.." Indeed, that's the favorite absurdity of the moment: to insist that it doesn't matter whether or not there's any evidence that guns are used effectively on any scale in self-defense, because the incidence of gun use doesn't accurately track the millions of times that the mere sight of a gun in the hands of a housewife scares off the bad guys, causing murderers otherwise determined on mayhem to run away screaming.

    Finding a correlation, eliminating a correlation, proposing a correlation - these are not inconclusive fitful stabs at truth: they are meaningful acts. And when you put them together with many other similar, even stronger correlations, a cause stares you in the face and asks you to sit down and take it seriously. To believe that gun laws don't work, you have to believe that each of the many studies showing that gun laws limit gun violence - all of them, every single one, from Canada to Australia and back home - are not just flawed at the margins or somewhat inconclusive but that they are fundamentally, entirely, completely, round-the-block wrong. And that isn't a plausible claim.

    Common sense confirms what social science correlates. The United States, after all, is hardly the only rich country in the world with laws. American insularity and the ignorance of others is powerful, but it need not be quite so absolute. There are (here we go again!) many countries that resemble ours in wealth and history; they have different gun laws, and they have much lower levels of gun violence. They have about the same incidence of crazy people, but after they have one psycho gun massacre they take action, and then very rarely have another. Meanwhile, the desperately dim efforts to equate some other potentially dangerous thing - cars or trucks or alcohol or airplanes - with guns gets more ridiculous each time they're attempted. Many good things can have bad consequences in the wrong circumstances. What ought to be done - indeed, exactly what we often do - is to limit the dangerous consequences while allowing for the good ones. That's why we do things like regulate who drives cars, put warning signs for pregnant women on wine, demand licenses on dogs, check people for box cutters before they board airplanes - all common-sense activities by which we attempt to regulate the risks of our pleasures. (And the Second Amendment has only very recently, and radically, been read as assuring an individual right to guns.)

    "But the actual legislation under review is minimal and meaningless!" It's true: background checks and a bit more enforcement of laws on straw purchases is hardly enough - but (once again) they need to be supported not just as symbols but also because we have learned that any impediment to violence, however low, is better than none at all, and small ones can be surprisingly potent. All kinds of laws help reduce gun violence. As Richard Florida wrote, in a study published in the Atlantic, "Firearm deaths are significantly lower in states with stricter gun control legislation. Though the sample sizes are small, we find substantial negative correlations between firearm deaths and states that ban assault weapons (-.45), require trigger locks (-.42), and mandate safe storage requirements for guns (-.48)." In other words, the mechanism of massacre is simple availability. Any obstacle might spare the life of a six-year-old.

    To live in a modern society is to accept moral complicity in many kinds of violence. We pay taxes, and drones kill distant kids; we pay for roads, and thousands are killed in cars; we assent to the murder of farm animals that, we can be confident, feel pain and fear. We justify these moral choices, and our complicity in them, either by reference to a greater good - killing terrorists is so essential that the collateral damage is morally acceptable - or, just as often, by pretending they aren't happening. All we can do is try to be clear about the kind of violence with which we are complicit.

    So to say that people who know the consequences and still do everything they can to ensure that gun laws don't change are complicit in the murder of children is to state, as unemotionally as possible, an inarguable fact. They have made a moral choice that the deaths of those children, and the deaths of those who will certainly die next, is justified by some other larger good: in this case, apparently, the sense of personal power that possessing guns provides. That's a moral choice, clearly made. But we shouldn't pretend for a minute that they - or we - are making any other.

    If American had gun laws like those in Canada, England, or Australia, it would have a level of gun violence more like that of Canada, England, or Australia. That's as certain a prediction as any that the social sciences can provide. To believe that gun control can't work here is to believe that the psyches of Americans are different from those of everyone else on earth. That's a form of American exceptionalism - the belief that Americans are uniquely evil and incorrigibly violent, and that nothing to be done about it - that doesn't seem to be the one that is usually endorsed.

    Keep the laws as they are, and the shootings, very often of children and high-school and college students, will go on. The President put it well on Thursday: "It won't solve every problem. There will still be gun deaths. There will still be tragedies. There will still be violence. There will still be evil. But we can make a difference if not just the activists here on this stage but the general public - including responsible gun owners - say, You know what, we can do better than this. We can do better to make sure that fewer parents have to endure the pain of losing a child to an act of violence." That's what the correlations show, and they show it beyond a reasonable doubt. Change the laws and more will live; keep them, and more children die. That's not an emotional statement; it's merely a descriptive one. It's not a complaint - or really, any longer, a cry of pain. It's not even a commentary. It's just a certainty.

Ego Trip

    One of the oddities of the gun-control debate - apart from ours being the only country that really has one - is that the gun side basically gave up on serious arguments about safety or self-defense or anything else a while ago. The old claims about the million - or was it two million? It kept changing - bad guys stopped by guns each year has faded under the light of scrutiny. Indeed, people who possess guns are almost five times more likely to be shot than those who don't. ("A gun may falsely empower its possessor to overreact, instigating and losing otherwise tractable conflicts with similarly armed persons," the authors of one study point out, to help explain that truth.) Far from providing greater safety, gun possession greatly increases the risk of getting shot - and, as has long been known, keeping a gun in the house chiefly endangers the people who live there.

    And so the new arguments for keeping as many guns as possible in the hands of as many people as possible tend to be more broadly fatalistic, and sometimes sniffily 'cultural.' Ours is a gun-ridden country and a gun-filled culture, the case goes, and to try and change that is not just futile but, in a certain sense, disrespectful, even ill-mannered. It's not just that Mayor Bloomberg's indignation is potentially counter-productive - basically, his critics suggest, if not so bluntly, because a rich, short Jew from New York is not a persuasive advocate against guns. It's that Mayor Bloomberg just doesn't get it, doesn't understand the central role that guns play in large parts of non-metropolitan American culture. What looks to his admirers like courage his detractors dismiss as snobbishness.

    And so the real argument about guns, and about assault weapons in particular, is becoming not primarily an argument about public safety or public health but an argument about cultural symbols. It has to do, really, with the illusions that guns provide, particularly the illusion of power. The attempts to use the sort of logic that helped end cigarette smoking don't quite work, because the 'smokers' in this case feel something less tangible and yet more valued than their own health is at stake. As my friend and colleague Alec Wilkinson wrote, with the wisdom of a long-ago cop, "Nobody really believes it's about maintaining a militia. It's about having possession of a tool that makes a person feel powerful nearly to the point of exaltation. I am not saying that people who love guns inordinately are unstable; I am saying that a gun is the most powerful device there is to accessorize the ego."

    It's true. Everyone, men especially, needs ego-accessories, and they are most often irrationally chosen. Middle-aged stockbrokers in New York collect Stratocasters and Telecasters they'll never play; Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld own more cars than they can drive. Wine cellars fill up with wine that will never be drunk. The propaganda for guns and the identification of gun violence with masculinity is so overpoweringly strong in our culture that it is indeed hard to ask those who already feel disempowered to resist their allure. If we asked all those middle-aged bankers to put away their Strats - an activity that their next-door neighbors would bless - they would be indignant. It's not about music; it's about me, they would say, and my right to own a thing that makes me happy. And so with guns. Dan Baum, for instance, has an interesting new book out, Gun Guys: A Road Trip. His subjects, those gun guys, are portrayed sympathetically - they are sympathetic - and one gets their indignation at what they see as their 'warrior ethic' being treated with contempt by non-gun guys. (That's, at least, how they experience it, though where it matters, in Congressional votes, there is little but deference.) As Baum points out, gun laws are loose in America because that's the way most Americans want it, or them.

Fake Arguments

    As the Senate gets set to show that you can fight the National Rifle Association, let's consider what has to be the worst reason ever put forward by anyone to oppose anything in the entire history of the human race: that the actions under consideration "won't prevent" future tragedies or "wouldn't have prevented" such-and-such sociopath from unloading hundreds of rounds into the bodies of children. Gun nuts invoke this argument as if it's some kind of clincher, a discussion-ender. It's anything but. It shows total ignorance about the reasons that we make laws in the first place. It demands that gun legislation meet a standard of performance that laws in no other arena of public policy are ever held to. It keeps gun-control forces constantly on the defensive because the people who cynically spout this nonsense in public know that many well-meaning but naive folks will buy it. It's stupid, but for these reasons it is surely more evil than stupid, and it must be stopped.

    Let's take my objections one by one. Why do we make laws? Well, of course, there is an element of prevention in all policy-making. We passed clean-air and clean-water laws in the 1970s in no small part to try to prevent selfish corporations and others from befouling the air and water. But did anyone think that the passage of such laws would prevent all pollution? Despite the kind of palaver politicians unload on us when a major bill is passed, obviously no sentient person thought any such thing. People are people, some of them are chiselers and sociopaths, and if giving a few hundred poor children asthma is going to increase their bottom line by 1 percent, they'll do it.

    Still, we made the laws. Why? For two other reasons. One, to have a ready statutory means by which to punish the chiselers and sociopaths. And two, to make a statement as a society about what sort of society we are. As it happens, we passed the Clean Water Act of 1972 in part simply to say: whatever sort of society we are, we aren't one in which we will watch as our rivers catch fire and not try to do anything about it.

    We do try to do something about it. Yet even so, and here is my second point, no one thinks laws against pollution will prevent all pollution. Similarly, no one supposes that laws against armed robbery will prevent all armed robbery. No one expects that laws against tax evasion will stop the selfish and the stingy from hiring their selfish and stingy lawyers to identify for them various selfish and stingy new ways around the laws. We do not presume man's perfectibility. And yet somehow, gun laws are supposed to meet the standard of being able to prevent all future massacres and are criticized as total failures if they don't? Absurd.

    This gets to point three, in which we reach the very heart of the gun lobby's cynicism and grandiose moral corruption. Of course, it's our desire that new laws might prevent tragedies. People don't want to see another Newtown. Admittedly, gun-control advocates are guilty of speaking in these kinds of tropes. It's a natural human urge among well-meaning people to want to prevent the deaths of children. But what the gun lobby does is that it takes this wholly decent desire and twists it into an excuse to permit the carnage to continue. Adam Lanza would have passed a background check, they say; therefore, make no changes in law. And sadly, many of those well-meaning people will buy this. It's an argument that's very hard for gun-control forces to win.

    Well, maybe Lanza would have passed a check. But maybe some future Lanza will not. And in any case the problem is hardly that the changes the Senate might pass try to do too much. They do far too little. The fact that bans on extended magazines and unlimited purchases of ammunition aren't even under serious consideration here is staggering and revolting. No sportsman or hunter needs 6,000 rounds of ammunition and high-capacity drum magazines (take a gander at these here yet that is exactly what Aurora killer James Holmes had.

    And here is the final sick irony. Say Congress actually passes what's under consideration. Then eight months from now there's another mass shooting. See, the NRA will sneer? Didn't prevent it. Yet it's the NRA that works every day in Washington to make sure Congress can't even consider things like magazine and ammunition bans that might be more effective. Imagine a doctor who gave a man with cancer a few antibiotics and then sneered, "See, told you; didn't work." This is what the NRA does.

    It would be nice if we could pass laws that would prevent any massacre from happening again. But we can't. And we shouldn't even be having a debate on those phony and stacked terms. The debate we should be having, and that some are trying to have, goes: we're sick and tired of burying these children and other innocent people, and we have to express our values as a society here, doing whatever we can hopefully to prevent future carnage, but even failing that, we need to give ourselves readier means to make sure future offenders - not just the butchers, but the people who illegally arm them - are prosecuted as fully as possible.

    What people really mean when they mount the prevention horse is: do nothing. Oh, now they've come up with arm the teachers, but the NRA 'plan' to do that is just an excuse so they had something to say after Newtown. In a way they, too, are expressing their values. But their values are that their virtually limitless conception of their 'rights' is more important than all these dead bodies. They've merely figured out that the prevention canard is the least morally objectionable way for them to express that. The rest of us need to talk about how morally objectionable it is.

Toddlers Kill More Than Terrorists


    Americans hate terrorists and love our kids, right? So you might be shocked to know that preschoolers with guns have taken more lives so far this year than the single U.S. terrorist attack, which claimed four lives in Boston.

    This is admittedly tongue-in-cheek, but one has to wonder if the NSA's PRISM program would have saved more lives had it been monitoring toddlers - or gun owners - rather than suspected terrorists.

    11 Deaths in Five Months Where Shooter Was 3 to 6 Years Old

    Listed below are the 11 gun fatalities I found where a preschooler pulled the trigger (from Jan. 1 to June 9, 2013). Starting with a list of five toddler shooting deaths The Jewish Daily Forward published in early May, I unearthed six additional cases. This tragic, unthinkable event has happened every month, like clock-work.

    Jan. 10: 6-year-old playmate shoots and kills 4-year-old Trinity Ross, Kansas City, Kan.

    Feb. 11: 4-year-old Joshua Johnson shoots and kills himself, Memphis, Tenn.

    Feb. 24: 4-year-old Jaiden Pratt dies after shooting himself in the stomach while his father sleeps, Houston.

    March 30: 4-year-old Rahquel Carr shot and killed either by 6-year-old brother or another young playmate, Miami.

    April 6: Josephine Fanning, 48, shot and killed by 4-year-old boy at a barbecue, Wilson County, Tenn.

    April 8: 4-year-old shoots and kills 6-year-old friend Brandon Holt, Toms River, N.J.

    April 9: 3-year-old is killed after he finds a pink gun that he thinks is a toy, Greenville, S.C.

    April 30: 2-year-old Caroline Sparks killed by her 5-year-old brother with his Cricket 'My First Rifle' marketed to kids, Cumberland County, Ky.

    May 1: 3-year-old Darrien Nez shoots himself in the face and dies after finding his grandmother's gun, Yuma, Ariz.

    May 7: 3-year-old Jadarrius Speights fatally shoots himself with his uncle's gun, Tampa, Fla.

    June 7: 4-year-old fatally shoots his father, Green Beret Justin Thomas, Prescott Valley, Ariz.

    At least 10 more toddlers have shot but not killed themselves or someone else this year (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). In the first three cases, the shooter was only 2 years old.

    I also found nine instances where children and teens 7 to 19 years old accidentally killed themselves, a family member or friend since January (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

    Of course, most if not all of the above deaths and injuries can be attributed to careless adult gun owners.

    While this analysis focuses on children, another equally accurate headline could read: U.S. Gun Culture Kills More Americans Than Terrorists Worldwide.



    In 2010, 13,186 people died in terrorist attacks worldwide, while 31,672 people were killed with firearms in America alone, reports CNN's Samuel Burke.

    We cannot deny that guns pose a real danger to innocent American lives and especially to children. While no one is 'coming to take the guns' of responsible people, we still must reach a compromise to address gun violence. I do not have all the answers, but I know as responsible citizens we have to do something.

    While some people refuse to accept any limits on gun ownership, we simply do not have the right in America to circumvent personal restrictions that protect society as a whole. We can drink and we can drive, but we cannot mix the two. We have free speech, but we cannot shout "fire" in a crowded theater. We have the Fourth Amendment, but we still submit to searches of our bodies and belongings for the sake of air safety.

    People who worship the Second Amendment should recognize the "well-regulated" aspect of gun ownership that the forefathers intended. Instead, we have a gun lobby that pays off senators to vote against background checks and gun culture that welcomes a 3-year-old as a lifetime NRA member. I worry for that child's playmates.

Guns and Suicide

    Twice as many Americans commit suicide in states where most households have a gun than in states with low rates of gun ownership, according to a new study.

    Several studies have linked gun ownership to the risk of suicide by firearm, according to Dr. Matthew Miller, the new study's lead author from the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

    But some critics question whether people living in states where lots of residents own guns are inherently more suicidal than those who live in places where ownership is less common.

    To address that critique, Miller and his colleagues gathered state-by-state data on gun ownership, suicide attempts and suicide deaths from a variety of sources, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and health surveys.

    They compared the 16 states with the highest gun ownership rates to the six states with the lowest rates. Both of those groups included about 62 million people.

    In the high gun ownership group, 51 percent of adults lived in a household with firearms, versus 15 percent of adults in the low gun ownership group.

    There were about 7,300 firearm suicides in the states with the most guns - including Alabama, Montana and West Virginia - in 2008 to 2009, according to findings published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

    That compared to 1,700 suicides by gun in the low ownership states, such as Hawaii, Massachusetts and New York.

    The number of non-gun suicides in the two sets of states was similar, at about 4,200 and 4,300, respectively. What's more, state-wide rates of suicide attempts did not differ based on levels of household gun ownership.

    "Living in a home with a gun greatly increases the risk of suicide, and that increased risk is not because people who live in homes with guns or in areas where guns are more prevalent are more suicidal," Miller told Reuters Health.

    "They're not. It's because when people make suicide attempts with guns, they're much more likely to die than when they make attempts with other commonly used methods."

    The increased suicide risk associated with gun ownership is not a pro-gun or anti-gun issue, he added.

    "We're not going to legislate our way out of suicide very easily, and that's not the goal," he said. "The goal is to help people realize that there is a risk."

    The study confirms that people with guns at home are no more likely to attempt to kill themselves - but they are more likely to succeed because they are more likely to use a gun, Dr. Eric Fleegler, a pediatric emergency medicine doctor at Boston Children's Hospital and instructor at Harvard Medical School, said.

    For example, about three percent of people who attempt suicide with drugs or cutting actually kill themselves, he said. But about 90 percent of attempts using a firearm are successful.

    According to the CDC, about 12 in every 100,000 Americans committed suicide in 2010 - half of them with a gun.

    "It is unlikely that we're going to take guns away per se, but we do need to make people understand the risks that are associated with this," said Fleegler, who studies firearms and public health but did not participate in the new research.

    People with guns at home can take safety precautions, he told Reuters Health, such as storing the gun in a lockbox and keeping the gun and ammunition in separate places.

    The researchers agreed, however, that there hasn't been much funding available to study whether such gun safety measures are effective for suicide prevention.

    After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, Miller noted, President Barack Obama announced he would make $10 million available to fund research on firearms and public health.

    Right now, he added, the CDC spends about $100,000 on firearms-related research, and the National Institutes of Health spends "almost nothing."

    Given that firearms are the second-leading cause of death among people under age 40 after car crashes, Miller said, even if that $10 million was made available every year it would still be "woefully inadequate."

A Doctor Speaks

    Emergency room doctor Garen Wintemute is one of a handful of US researchers brave enough to tackle the problem of gun violence. He tells Tiffany O'Callaghan why it is so hard to make inroads.

    How bad is gun violence in the US?
    It takes upwards of 30,000 lives a year and injures another 75,000. We spend $100 billion a year on this problem, including the criminal justice system's efforts to prevent and punish.

    Why is it so difficult to tackle?
    Federal funding for research is less than $200,000 a year. In contrast, public health research on motor vehicle accidents – which also claim 30,000 lives each year – receives close to $4 million. So the data that might be used to identify patterns is simply not there.

    Why is there so little money to research it?
    This did not happen by accident, there was a conscious, deliberate and successful effort to prevent funding from being available. It began in the mid-1990s and continues today.

    After recent mass shootings, hasn't funding for gun violence research received more attention?
    There is a proposal in Congress to allow for $10 million in research funding. But I suspect it essentially has no chance of making it. Even if it did, our Department of Health and Human Services prohibits any of the funds from being used, and I'm quoting directly here, "to advocate or promote gun control". That means even if I had money to do the research it would be a crime to talk about the policy implications.

    Is there any prospect of limiting access to guns?
    It is too late for that, if you mean a large-scale disarmament as has been accomplished in other countries. We cannot remove firearms from society. There are 315 million people and more than 300 million firearms. We are going to have to find solutions that acknowledge the widespread availability of firearms.

    What interventions do we know actually work?
    Some of the best evidence is on background checks. Finding people who are prohibited from owning firearms and preventing them from acquiring any reduces their risk of committing crimes that involve firearms by 25 to 30 per cent. There is also good evidence that regulating the market makes it more difficult to acquire firearms for illegal purposes.

    Still, based on the evidence, our criteria for denying purchase and possession don't go far enough. We prohibit felons from owning firearms but we should also prohibit people with a history of violent misdemeanours or alcohol abuse, which is associated with a very large increase in risk of violence.

    What should the research priorities be?
    We need to re-examine the basic epidemiology of firearm violence and determine what the risk factors are, as well as the things that decrease risk. We also need to look at criminal use of firearms – how do they become so readily available on the street? The more we understand the illegal market the more we can intervene and disrupt it. And we need to study interventions to prevent violence. There are efforts at the state and local level to try new things, but often we don't have good data on whether or not they make a difference.

    What new strategies are being trialled?
    There is a lot of interest in recovering firearms from people who bought them legally but have since been prohibited after being convicted of a violent crime, put under a restraining order, or developing serious mental illness. California has such a programme, but it's too soon to know how well it's working.

    A recurring issue with mass shootings seems to be untreated mental health problems...
    There is widespread belief that serious mental illness is associated with a substantial increase in the risk of violence. That is simply not true. The mental health criteria for prohibiting someone from owning firearms need to be revised. They probably let a lot of people who present an increased risk purchase firearms and at the same time rope in people who do not.

    Is there substance to the argument that when more people carry guns, everyone is safer?
    In 1998 John Lott wrote a book titled More Guns Less Crime. He has generated studies supporting that conclusion, but his work has been debunked in a number of ways. In the scientific community the consensus is that he is wrong. Increases in firearm ownership and use are associated with increases in firearm violence.

    What about the idea that Good Samaritans with guns could have intervened in mass shootings?
    It's hard to say. If a trained shooter had been able to shoot James Holmes in that movie theatre in Colorado, then maybe fewer people would have been hurt. But when Gabby Giffords was shot in Arizona, an armed man was preparing to shoot the person he saw with a gun. People at the scene said, "Wait, the guy with the gun is the good guy!" Unarmed citizens had disarmed Jared Loughner. The man with the gun has said that, if he reacted more quickly, he would have shot the wrong guy.

    You have said that we can't focus on trying to prevent the last tragedy. What do you mean?
    These events are all different; the precise circumstances of the Sandy Hook school shooting won't occur again. Focusing on preventing the last shooting is like fighting the last war: the next one will be different.

    But speaking more broadly, most firearm violence does not involve mass shootings. Far and away the larger share of the problem is taken up by violence that occurs day in, day out and doesn't make the headlines.

    Why have you dedicated yourself to studying gun violence as a public health problem?
    Initially, I worked more broadly on injury prevention. But over time I came to realise that firearm violence was unique in that it was a very large problem on which few people were working. A lot of us have realised that, as clinicians, the way to reduce the number of people who die from gun violence is to prevent them from being shot in the first place.

    What is it like to treat a person who has been shot?
    The vast majority of people who die from gun violence never get to the emergency room. But those who do are typically in a great deal of pain, and very afraid.

New Scientist editorial

    THE murder of 12 people at the Naval Yard in Washington DC last week was both very familiar and very strange. Familiar in the sense that mass shootings have become part of life in the US. Strange in the sense that the calls for action that usually follow such events were muted, with President Obama's reiterated support for gun control seeming half-hearted.

    It seems the failure to enact any legislation after the shootings at Sandy Hook elementary school has emasculated the gun control lobby: if the massacre of 20 young children can't shift the argument, nothing will. As The Washington Post concluded: "The issue, for the foreseeable future, is settled: Gun control is dead."

    One oft-stated explanation is that the gun lobby has quashed federal funding for research into firearms violence. President Obama tried to put that right after Sandy Hook. But the new funding he ordered is a modest $10 million and it comes with strings: using the findings of any resulting research to advocate gun control would be a crime (see "The doctor treating the US gun epidemic").

    Perhaps that will force gun control advocates to think harder about what they would do with such findings. We know that on "culture war" issues, evidence alone won't win over die-hard opponents – climate change being a prime example. Simply laying out anti-gun evidence, however forcefully and eloquently, may not only fail to change gun enthusiasts' minds, but could cause them to dig their heels in further.

    Instead, gun control advocates could learn from climate activists who are devising new strategies to win over the hearts and minds of doubters. That means finding ways to convey the issues that don't instantly clash with the cherished values of those they are trying to persuade (see "Climate science: Why the world won't listen").

    Rather than make the classic mistake of assuming that evidence alone will carry the day, gun control advocates need clever communication strategies to shift the debate. If they don't develop them, gun control will not only be dead – it will be buried, too.

Britain

    IN A turf war in Birmingham, the two gangs involved used the same gun for their tit-for-tat shootings, renting it in turn from the same third party, says Martin Parker, head of forensics at the National Ballistics Intelligence Service (NABIS). The paucity of guns in Britain is both testament to the success of its gun-control regime and one of the reasons for it.

    Tucked discreetly away on a Birmingham back street, NABIS has become a key weapon in the fight against gun crime. In a nearby laboratory, and in hubs in Glasgow, London and Manchester, the staff of around 40 identify firearms using the marks left on the bullets from them, using a database to determine whether they are from known guns. Where the bullet is found but not the gun, they list it as an “inferred weapon”. When a gun is found, they fire it and check the bullets’ markings to see if they match previous shootings.

    Ballistics intelligence has improved recently in two ways. First, it is faster. Previously, months could pass before police officers knew if a gun had been used before, says Iain O’Brien, the head of NABIS. Now NABIS can tell them within 24 hours.

    Second, the general intelligence is better. When it is sent a gun, NABIS identifies every occasion it has been used, no matter when or where, and tells all relevant forces. In the past, forensic scientists would tell investigators about recent cases but earlier ones might slip through the net. NABIS has thus been able to put together a national picture of trends in the availability, supply and use of firearms.

    Gun crime in Britain was low to start with and is falling. NABIS was set up in 2008 when the police and politicians worried that shootings were on the up. Cases such as the murders of Letisha Shakespeare and Charlene Ellis in Birmingham in 2003 fanned fears. That the police can name such individual victims, however, highlights their rarity. London had 99 fewer shootings in 2012-13 than the previous year, a 20% drop, says detective superintendent Gordon Allison of Trident, the Metropolitan Police’s anti-gang unit.

    Shootings are rare because guns are scarce. Some criminals steal legally owned shotguns. Some new ones are posted to Britain using fast-parcel services. Others are smuggled through ports. But the risks are higher and the returns lower than for smuggling drugs. Some crooks also reactivate decommissioned guns. Antique firearms are increasingly popular. During the 2011 riots a 19th-century St Etienne revolver was fired. The use of such heirlooms suggests that it is hard to find new weapons. Bullets are in short supply so volatile homemade ones are often deployed.

    Shortages also mean criminals use weapons repeatedly, leaving a useful trail of evidence. Some, like the Birmingham gangsters, hire them from others. Clean guns—ones that have not been used before—are both rare and expensive. Other countries, such as Ireland and Spain, use the same database system, allowing NABIS to share information and track guns beyond Britain’s borders. America uses it too, but tracking the guns used in crimes there would be a Sisyphean task: few guns are used repeatedly there because it is so easy to buy new ones. Gun-starved Britons cannot be so cavalier.

Need More Guns

    The city council in Washington City, Utah, recently approved the construction of a firing range next to the Dixie GunWorx shop, even though the firing range's neighbor on the other side is a women's domestic-abuse shelter (whose officials fear that gunfire might re-traumatize some of the victims who had sought refuge). Dixie's CEO told KSTU-TV that if the shelter victims had been armed in the first place, they could have prevented the abuse.

Kalashnikov's Gun

    One of Russia’s newest museums is devoted to what may be the world’s deadliest work of art, the AK-47 assault rifle. In the western Urals, a redoubt of weapons manufacture since Tsarist days, the museum might be dismissed as a shrine of nostalgia for the Soviet arsenal. Yet the AK-47 remains a unique advertisement for a distinctly Russian approach to technology, one with lessons beyond the world of weapons enthusiasts.

    The Kalashnikov is the most successful firearm in history. William Hartung and Rachel Stohr report in Foreign Policy that between 70 and 100 million of the weapons are in circulation, compared with just seven million U.S. M-16s. In Afghanistan, the AK-47 costs as little as $10.

    The AK-47 has become a global brand, the preferred weapon of revolutionaries and insurgents for decades, but nevertheless uniting the bitter adversaries of the Cold War. Lt. Gen. Mikhail Kalashnikov, 85, is a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, even though the Central Museum of the Armed Forces in Moscow features an AK-47 that was used by a North Vietnamese soldier to kill 78 U.S. troops. Indeed, the same museum collection shows Egyptian and Chinese knockoffs used by anti-Soviet Afghan fighters, and countless similar ones are in the hands of al-Qaeda.

    The AK-47 illustrates the power of incremental adaptation. As a tank sergeant in World War II, Mikhail Kalashnikov saw that most Soviet troops had only carbines against the superior range of the German Sturmgewehr. While recovering from battlefield wounds, he began to create a design for a new weapon, one that could be assembled with relatively loose tolerances by relatively inexperienced workers, avoiding the supply bottlenecks that often resulted from the German cult of fine craftsmanship. A tractor plant originally produced the gun. Not only was the AK-47 simple to manufacture, but it could withstand rough handling in harsh terrain and climates.

    Russian ingenuity flourishes in isolation and adversity. When I visited Moscow in 1988, I saw the result of a minor car crash near the giant Rossiya Hotel. A fender bender dented the heavy Soviet sheet metal, when lighter Western metal parts would have creased or plastic parts shattered. There were surely brigades of body-and-fender men ready to hammer them back into shape rather than bolt in new replacements. The scarcity of consumer goods, in fact, helped promote of ubiquitous fix-it (remont) shops for small appliances wherever I walked in Moscow; try to find their counterpart in the capitals of the throwaway West.

    Thus, the worldwide success of the AK-47 design was not a fluke. Even the United States has bought Kalashnikov-style arms from factories in former satellite countries in order to equip its allies in Afghanistan and Iraq. The designer and Russian authorities have even claimed violation of intellectual property laws for these knockoffs. Whatever the ultimate settlement, the decline of the market for Russian successors to the AK-47 reveals an unintended consequence of its rugged, reliable simplicity. It is all too easy for non-Russians, including anti-Russian terrorists, to reuse, repair, and manufacture it.

    The Russian style does have other, more benign outcomes. A U.S. aerospace company has imported NK-33 liquid fuel rockets, first developed in the 1960s, for their exceptional reliability. Russia remains a major exporter of night-vision goggles, with 15,000 workers in the consumer night-vision industry in 1999. And Tetris, which helped launch Nintendo’s Game Boy in the late 1980s, achieved its addictive fame through ingenious use of the limited processing power and memory of the day; it was the masterpiece of Alexei Pajitnov, a mathematician in the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

    Pajitnov, who has lived in the United States for more than 13 years, continues to create puzzle games with a global following. He has described Tetris as “a kind of game which helps you order the world. You fight against chaos.” Which is itself a Russian sentiment. Because Russia has often stood at the edge of chaos, its best technology is art of a special kind.

The Science

    [Skeptic], Michael Shermer

    According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 31,672 people died by guns in 2010 (the most recent year for which U.S. figures are available), a staggering number that is orders of magnitude higher than that of comparable Western democracies. What can we do about it? National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre believes he knows: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” If LaPierre means professionally trained police and military who routinely practice shooting at ranges, this observation would at least be partially true. If he means armed private citizens with little to no training, he could not be more wrong.

    Consider a 1998 study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery that found that “every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.” Pistol owners' fantasy of blowing away home-invading bad guys or street toughs holding up liquor stores is a myth debunked by the data showing that a gun is 22 times more likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or injury, a suicide attempt or a homicide than it is for self-defense. I harbored this belief for the 20 years I owned a Ruger .357 Magnum with hollow-point bullets designed to shred the body of anyone who dared to break into my home, but when I learned about these statistics, I got rid of the gun.

    More insights can be found in a 2013 book from Johns Hopkins University Press entitled Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis, edited by Daniel W. Webster and Jon S. Vernick, both professors in health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In addition to the 31,672 people killed by guns in 2010, another 73,505 were treated in hospital emergency rooms for nonfatal bullet wounds, and 337,960 nonfatal violent crimes were committed with guns. Of those 31,672 dead, 61 percent were suicides, and the vast majority of the rest were homicides by people who knew one another.

    For example, of the 1,082 women and 267 men killed in 2010 by their intimate partners, 54 percent were shot by guns. Over the past quarter of a century, guns were involved in greater number of intimate partner homicides than all other causes combined. When a woman is murdered, it is most likely by her intimate partner with a gun. Regardless of what really caused Olympic track star Oscar Pistorius to shoot his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp (whether he mistook her for an intruder or he snapped in a lover's quarrel), her death is only the latest such headline. Recall, too, the fate of Nancy Lanza, killed by her own gun in her own home in Connecticut by her son, Adam Lanza, before he went to Sandy Hook Elementary School to murder some two dozen children and adults. As an alternative to arming women against violent men, legislation can help: data show that in states that prohibit gun ownership by men who have received a domestic violence restraining order, gun-caused homicides of intimate female partners have been reduced by 25 percent.

    Another myth to fall to the facts is that gun-control laws disarm good people and leave the crooks with weapons. Not so, say the Johns Hopkins authors: “Strong regulation and oversight of licensed gun dealers—defined as having a state law that required state or local licensing of retail firearm sellers, mandatory record keeping by those sellers, law enforcement access to records for inspection, regular inspections of gun dealers, and mandated reporting of theft of loss of firearms—was associated with 64 percent less diversion of guns to criminals by in-state gun dealers.”

    Finally, before we concede civilization and arm everyone to the teeth pace the NRA, consider the primary cause of the centuries-long decline of violence as documented by Steven Pinker in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: the rule of law by states that turned over settlement of disputes to judicial courts and curtailed private self-help justice through legitimate use of force by police and military trained in the proper use of weapons.

The Science: Reader Response

    In discussing gun control in “Gun Science” [Skeptic], Michael Shermer first cites a 1998 paper in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery concluding that guns in the home are much more likely to be used in criminal assaults or homicides than for self-defense. Oddly, that study accounted only for cases where criminals were killed or wounded and not the more typical scenario in which an attacker is scared away. Cases where the attacker is killed or wounded account for well less than 1 percent.

    Shermer ignores the 2004 National Academy of Sciences report that rejected the 1998 study and similar ones. As the NAS report noted, this type of public health research fails to account for the endogeneity problem - that it is especially people who feel threatened who tend to acquire guns. Fixing this reverses the claims.

    John R. Lott, Jr. Author of More Guns, Less Crime, third edition (University of Chicago Press, 2010)

    SHERMER REPLIES: The 1998 paper is one of several that determined how often guns in the home are used to injure or kill in self-defense, compared with how often they are involved in accidental shootings, criminal assaults and suicide attempts. Tragic shootings outnumber defensive ones by more than 40 to one. In addition to cases in which a homeowner chased a bad guy away, the 1998 study did not count how often guns in the home were used to threaten or to intimidate a family member, a spouse, a girlfriend or a neighbor.

    The self-defense figures Lott cites were derived by extrapolating low-frequency responses to public opinion polls to the entire U.S. population and are thus wildly inflated. Police reports suggest the use of guns in self-defense is much less common. An audit of Atlanta Police Department reports of 198 home-invasion crimes identified three cases in which victims successfully defended themselves. Intruders got to the homeowner's gun twice as often.

    As for the NAS report: when the committee opined about case-control research, it was criticizing an analytical method most, if not all, of its members had never employed. The endogeneity issue is a case in point. The committee speculated that any statistical association between guns in the home and violent death may exist because people acquire firearms in response to specific or perceived threats or because gun owners may be more or less violence-prone.

    But Arthur Kellermann, the lead author of the 1998 study that had been referred to in the committee's report, has militated against that possibility*. For instance, in a 1993 case-control study, he questioned households about a wide range of risk factors for violence and took any differences into account through logistic regression. In addition, every household was matched with a control in the same neighborhood, which ensured similar socioeconomic status and exposure to crime.

    Interestingly, the study found that a household's risk of homicide from an intruder was neither higher nor lower if a gun was kept there but that the risk of homicide from a family member or an intimate acquaintance was much higher.

20 Kids A Day

    Almost one child or teen an hour is injured by a firearm seriously enough to require hospitalization, a new analysis finds. Six percent of the 7,391 hospitalizations analyzed in 2009 resulted in a death, says the study in February's Pediatrics, released Monday.

    The damage caused by gun-related injuries rarely gets the same attention as fatalities, "but that every day, 20 of our children are hospitalized for firearms injury, often suffering severe and costly injuries, clearly shows that this is a national public health problem," says Robert Sege, director of the Division of Family and Child Advocacy at Boston Medical Center and a co-author of the study.

    Despite declining rates over the past decade, firearm injuries remain the second leading cause of death, behind motor vehicle crashes, for teens ages 15 to 19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    Children who survive firearm injuries often require extensive follow-up treatment, including rehabilitation, home health care, hospital readmission from delayed effects of the injury, and mental health or social services, Sege says.

    Although a number of studies have used vital statistics data to examine pediatric fatalities related to firearms, this is the first to highlight the burden of non-fatal injuries using hospitalization data, he says.

    Researchers analyzed a nationally representative sample of discharge data collected on children and adolescents (up to age 20) in 2009. The data, released in 2011, are the most recent available, Sege says.

    In addition to 453 of the 7,391 hospitalizations that year resulting from firearm-related injuries, other findings show:

    • The most common types of firearm injuries included open wounds (52%), fractures (50%) and internal injuries of the thorax, abdomen or pelvis (34%).

    • In children under age 10, 75% of hospitalizations were due to unintentional injuries.

    • Rates were highest for those ages 15 to 19 (27.94 per 100,000.)

    •Of all hospitalizations, 89% were males; the hospitalization rate for males was 15.22 per 100,000, compared with 1.93 per 100,000 for females. The hospitalization rate for black males was 44.77 per 100,000, more than 10 times that for white males.

    The study detailed a significant racial gap: Black children and adolescents comprised 47% of all hospitalizations, 54% of hospitalizations resulting from assaults, 36% from unintentional injuries and 54% from undetermined causes.

    Noting the significantly higher poverty rate for young black males compared with young white males, Sege says the data did not allow researchers to "separate the effects of poverty from the effects of race."

    Nor did the data indicate what types of guns were used or where the injury occurred. The findings emphasize "the need for funding for public health research to find the best way to reduce children's access to firearms," he says.

NRA and Craven Politicians

    I don’t think I’ve ever been as heartbroken by anything as I was, last night, by the video of Richard Martinez, whose twenty-year-old son, Christopher, a college student at the University of California Santa Barbara, had been murdered the day before. Christopher and six others were killed in a mass shooting near campus. That I have a twenty-year-old son who is also a college student makes an empathetic response easy, almost obligatory—but I suspect that many others felt the same way, and that they felt this way because they were hearing a hard truth spoken clearly. Martinez, almost overcome with a grief that he knows and we know will never fade, not for as long as he lives, still struggled to speak sanely in that moment. And so there was something almost heartening amid the heartbreak. Richard Martinez, in the height of his grief, somehow did the hardest thing there is, and that is to find the courage to speak a painful truth: “Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the N.R.A.,” he said. “They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live? When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say, ‘Stop this madness; we don’t have to live like this?’ Too many have died. We should say to ourselves: not one more.”

    Christopher died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the N.R.A. That’s true. That the killer in question was in the grip of a mad, woman-hating ideology, or that he was also capable of stabbing someone to death with a knife, are peripheral issues to the central one of a gun culture that has struck the Martinez family and ruined their lives. (The shooter, Elliot Rodger, had three semi-automatic handguns that, according to the Los Angeles Times, he’d purchased legally.) Why did Christopher Michael-Martinez die? Because the N.R.A. and the politicians they intimidate enable people to get their hands on weapons and ammunition whose only purpose is to kill other people as quickly and as lethally as possible. How do we know that they are the ‘because’ in this? Because every other modern country has suffered from the same kinds of killings, from the same kinds of sick kids, and every other country has changed its laws to stop them from happening again, and in every other country it hasn’t happened again. (Australia is the clearest case—a horrific gun massacre, new laws, no more gun massacres—but the same is true of Canada, Great Britain, you name it.)

    Martinez’s brave words put me in mind of a simple point, which I failed to make in a long essay about language this week, or didn’t make strongly enough. The war against euphemism and cliché matters not because we can guarantee that eliminating them will help us speak nothing but the truth but, rather, because eliminating them from our language is an act of courage that helps us get just a little closer to the truth. Clear speech takes courage. Every time we tell the truth about a subject that attracts a lot of lies, we advance the sanity of the nation. Plain speech matters because when we speak clearly we are more likely to speak truth than when we retreat into slogan and euphemism; avoiding euphemism takes courage because it almost always points plainly to responsibility. To say “torture” instead of “enhanced interrogation” is hard, because it means that someone we placed in power was a torturer. That’s a hard truth and a brutal responsibility to accept. But it’s so.

    Speaking clearly also lets us examine the elements of a proposition plainly. We know that slogans masquerading as plain speech are mere rhetoric because, on a moment’s inspection, they reveal themselves to be absurd. “The best answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” reveals itself to be a lie on a single inspection: the best answer is to not let the bad guy have a gun. “Guns don’t kill people, people do.” No: obviously, people with guns kill more people than people without them. Why not ban knives or cars, which can be instruments of death, too? Because these things were designed to help people do things other than kill people. “Gun control” means controlling those things whose first purpose is to help people kill other people. (I’ve written at length about farmers and hunting rifles, and of how they’re properly controlled in Canada. In any case, if guns were controlled merely as well as cars and alcohol, we’d be a long way along.) And the idea that you can be pro-life and still be pro-gun: if your primary concern is actually with the sacredness of life, then you have to stand with Richard Martinez, in memory of his son.

    There, that isn’t hard, is it? The war against euphemism matters most because it forces us to look at the truth we already know. The actual consequences of the N.R.A. and the gun policy it frightens those craven politicians into sponsoring is the death of kids like Christopher Michael-Martinez. This truth may not triumph tomorrow, but the truth remains the truth. It would be nice if the President, who knows all this perfectly well, put aside his conciliatory manner and his search for consensus and just said it. Speak up, Mr. President! Speak plainly. Just say, “Last night, I heard Chris’s dad. He’s right.”

Fark and The Onion

    Onion article on another mass shooting in US.

    In the days following a violent rampage in southern California in which a lone attacker killed seven individuals, including himself, and seriously injured over a dozen others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Tuesday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place. “This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said North Carolina resident Samuel Wipper, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations. “It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this guy from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what he really wanted.” At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past five years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”

    Fark Thread in response to Onion article

    That's where you're wrong. In Canada ...

    Can't buy any guns or ammo (pistols or long guns) without a Firearms Acquisition Certificate (FAC), which involves a full federal background check.

    Firearms cannot be openly carried.

    Handguns cannot be carried anywhere except to and from a gun range and, even then, in the truck of the vehicle in a locked box, unloaded.

    Virtually impossible to get the equivalent of a "concealed carry" permit for personal protection. Last I read there were less than 500 such permits across the country and they were held mostly by people involved with the criminal justice system but who weren't cops (ie: the crown attorney who prosecuted the Montreal Hells Angels had one, iirc)

    Black market handguns are marked-up 3X-5X because of the border-smugging risk. This means that while "upper echelon" criminals and drug dealers do indeed have pistols, the on-the-street drug dealers, the crack head who holds up gas stations and the angry drunk guy at the bar have no access to guns, especially not handguns.

    "Private" sales are like cars. You can sell your gun but you need to confirm the sale through the government and both parties need to have their FACs in-order. There's a fee for making a gun sale.

    All the cool toys American gunners love are banned. Silencers? Banned. Magazines over (iirc) 10 rounds? Banned. Derringers? Military-style weapons? AR-anything? Anything automatic? Banned.

    Higher echelon drug dealers shoot each other in Canada's big cities all the time. Not as often as in American big cities, but frequently enough that "...a shooting tonight in Surrey" is guaranteed to be the lead story on my local news at least once a week. Doesn't affect me and doesn't really bother me. It's the price we pay for a thriving black market cocaine, heroin and cannabis industry. Mall shootings, school shootings, workplace shootings, and mass shootings of any kind are so rare that the last one that comes to mind is that Lepine SOB who shot up a bunch of engineers (all women -- he and USCB guy share the same rage) at U of Montreal in the 1980s.

    Sorry, America. You're awash in guns and you love them and that's why people keep getting shot.

    (cue "b-b-but big cities, urban populations, black people, minorities, population density and Switzerland" non sequiturs from the gunners who don't really give a shiat about the carnage caused by their "culture" because...well, really because they're selfish asses)

    **************************************

    The article says the only nation where this regularly happens. The massacre you linked to in Norway happened in the summer of 2011, nearly 3 years ago. By way of comparison, if you consider a mass shooting to have a total of 4 or more injured or dead, we've had at least 106 this year. Hell, the same day as the BMW driving eternal virgin killed 14 people there was another mass shooting that killed one and injured 7.

    Anyone in here (not from the area) even hear about that one in New Orleans the same day? They're so common here the media needs to pick and choose which ones to cover.

    By that same metric, there were at least 365 last year. It's literally a daily thing here in the exceptional USA.

    ****************************************

    there are real, innocent human beings murdered in a college town because a nut can buy lethal fire power on a whim without background checks. And, you support this?

    ****************************************

    In this case, a gun was the weapon he chose. Had he floored it through the quad of a college tossing out Molotov's would we be discussing controls on the purchase of flammables?

    If that's the case, is it just an enormous coincidence that the vast majority of mass/spree killings in the United States over the past century or so have been conducted with firearms and not Molotov's... or knifes... or bombs... or cars... or literally everything else people have used to kill historically combined? Is it really just a coincidence? Or could it be that as part of the tripartite "means, motive, and opportunity" of crime, firearms satisfy the "means" and "opportunity" part so much more easily than, say, improvised exploding devices, or cars, or knives, or socks loaded with oranges when someone decides to kill every mother f*cker in the room?

    But, hey, the whole "doing nothing" thing is really working out for us, isn't it? Especially when we do nothing about the alleged motive behind all of these regular tragedies, too - you know, the omnipresent mental illness problem that seems to have been cropping up more and more as more and more dudes decide that people in their area aren't as dead as they should be. It's so great to say "this thing I love so much that I want to f*ck it with my dick isn't the problem, but that thing that I don't care about is the real problem. And because I don't care about it, I'm not really going to do anything about it."

    I'd maybe give more of a sh*t about the opinions of people who say "guns aren't at all any part of the problem here, it's mental illness that's the problem" if they then turned around and worked their f*cking asses off at doing anything to improve the state of mental health care in this country. But they don't. Because they don't give a sh*t about mental illness, they just want an excuse to not have to think about how their hobby may be a factor in devastating events like this and maybe have to realistically consider setting up something that makes it more difficult - not impossible, just more difficult - to acquire a firearm.

    *******************************************

    Criminals' guns don't magically appear from nowhere. They are sold to them. Legally, illegally, doesn't matter. When you wash a country in guns, the criminals will acquire them in order to overpower the citizens who also have guns, who will then further arm themselves to feel safe from the criminals who have guns.

    The gun industry makes bank both ways, and it's a really great issue to use for political scream-fests because there are few emotional issues more easy to manipulate than the perceived safety of yourself and your family.

    This is a classic arms race. Both sides have vested self-interest in upping the ante and you certainly can't tell people they don't have a right to defend themselves, while arming the very people from which they're trying to protect themselves. And like all arms races, they are expensive and messy and stupid and usually end poorly.

    While there's historical rationale to having an armed population for reasons of holding a central government in check, that has long ceased to be practically applicable, and now it's purely an arms race tapping into fear, culture wars, and a feeling of loss of control. And the price we pay is a gun death rate 20x higher than the rest of the developed world. Some are fine with this number, some aren't, but let's put it this way: it's certainly not a selling point for the country in terms of a place to do business and raise a family.

    *********************************************

    It's not a cultural problem at all. When I was a young, gun ownership was an awesome responsibility granted only after training and tests. Now, because of the NRA, gun ownership is freely available to very angry people, Bundy people, because the very angry people purchase many guns to kill people. That helps the NRA sponsors.

    What good stats are you talking about? Here's one now. Our "well regulated militia" kills too many innocent Americans. Gun nuts support the NRA. It is really not going to last much longer for your kith and kin.

    *********************************************

    The solution to this problem is clear, but unfortunately gun nuts refuse to offer any concessions.

    1) Ban assault weapons: semi-automatic rifles with pistol grips, adjustable stocks or flash hiders.
    2) Limit all firearm magazines to a maximum capacity of ten rounds.
    3) Severely restrict how civilians may carry firearms; eliminate "open carry" and greatly restrict or eliminate "concealed carry". Ideally, only active and retired law enforcement will be allowed to carry guns in public.
    4) Mandate a background check on all firearm purchases.
    5) Maintain a list of "safe" firearms; only firearm certified by the state as "safe" may be sold.
    6) Mandate a ten-day waiting period on firearm purchases.
    7) Require that all handguns have imprinted on their firing pins identifying information, so that this information (which would include the serial number) is "microstamped" on the primer of the shell when the gun is fired.
    8) Mandate completion of a handgun safety course before being permitted to purchase a handgun.
    9) Make all currently National Firearms Act devices (silencers, short-barreled rifles, machine guns) entirely illegal to own.

    Implementing those common sense restrictions could have prevented this tragedy. Unfortunately, the National Rifle Association has stood in the way, and now they have more blood on their hands.

Guns Kill Kids

    Caroline Starks was 2 years old. Her 5-year-old brother was playing nearby with his birthday present: a .22-caliber Crickett rifle. His mother stepped outside for a moment, certain the gun wasn’t loaded. She was wrong. Caroline was pronounced dead a few hours later at the Cumberland County Hospital in Kentucky.

    Despite harrowing tragedies like Caroline’s death, the National Rifle Association is committed to expanding firearm ownership among children. The NRA’s recent convention in Indianapolis included a “Youth Day” to promote firearms for children, an event from which the media was banned. For years, gun manufacturers and the NRA have marketed firearms to children ages 5 to 12, insisting that programs such as the Eddie Eagle Safety Program ensure the safety of children. If they truly believe this, they are mistaken.

    The overwhelming empirical evidence indicates that the presence of a gun makes children less safe; that programs such as Eddie Eagle are insufficient; and that measures the NRA and extreme gun advocates vehemently oppose, such as gun safes and smart guns, could dramatically reduce the death toll. Study after study unequivocally demonstrates that the prevalence of firearms directly increases the risk of youth homicide, suicide, and unintentional death. This effect is consistent across the United States and throughout the world. As a country, we should be judged by how well we protect our children. By any measure, we are failing horribly.

    The United States accounts for nearly 75 percent of all children murdered in the developed world. Children between the ages of 5 and 14 in the United States are 17 times more likely to be murdered by firearms than children in other industrialized nations.

    Children from states where firearms are prevalent suffer from significantly higher rates of homicide, even after accounting for poverty, education, and urbanization. A study focusing on youth in North Carolina found that most of these deaths were caused by legally purchased handguns. A recent meta-analysis revealed that easy access to firearms doubled the risk of homicide and tripled the risk for suicide among all household members. Family violence is also much more likely to be lethal in homes where a firearm is present, placing children especially in danger. Murder-suicides are another major risk to children and are most likely to be committed with a gun.

    In light of empirical reality, the safest policy is not having a gun in the home.

    Crucially, these deaths are not offset by defensive gun use. As one study found, for every time a gun is used legally in self-defense at home, there are “four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.” A study of adolescents in California found that there were 13 times as many threatening as self-defensive uses of guns. Of the defensive encounters, many arose in confrontations that became hostile because of the presence of a firearm.

    In the overall suicide rate, the United States ranks roughly in the middle of the pack among industrialized nations. However, we are the exception when it comes to suicides among children between the ages of 5 and 14, with an overall rate twice the average of other developed nations. This stark difference is driven almost exclusively by a firearm-related suicide rate that is 10 times the average of other industrialized nations.

    Adolescents living in states with higher gun prevalence suffer from higher rates of suicide. Adolescents who commit suicide are significantly more likely to live with firearms in their homes even after adjusting for various risk factors. The increased risk holds true regardless of how the firearm is stored or the type of gun. Firearms that are stored loaded have the highest risk, while safely stored guns (locked and unloaded) are much safer. Proper firearm storage can’t mitigate the entire risk of adolescent gun suicide, but it is a necessary step.

    In terms of accidental fatalities, American children younger than 15 are nine times more likely to die by a gun accident than those in the rest of the developed world. Children living in states with higher levels of firearm availability also suffer from significantly higher rates of unintentional gun deaths. Studies indicate the vast majority of these shootings involve either family or friends. These statistics indicate that parents’ ownership of a weapon is a significant risk not only to their own children but also to their children’s friends. As a report from the New York Times revealed, accidental killings are significantly underreported in the official data, often being classified as homicides or suicides rather than accidents. In several states there were twice as many accidental gun deaths than the official record indicated.

    In light of this empirical reality, coupled with the fact that many gun owners are unaware that children have handled their guns, the safest policy is not having a gun in the home. The American Academy of Pediatrics strongly advocates this approach to safety.

    In contrast, the NRA claims that its safety programs work and are sufficient, despite significant evidence to the contrary. The NRA ignores the overwhelming evidence that firearms make children less safe and continues to promote bills that forbid pediatricians from talking to parents about guns and safety measures.

    Toy guns have tomes of regulation dedicated to reducing the risk of fatal accidents.

    In homes that do have guns, safely storing a firearm locked and unloaded is critical. Laws holding gun owners responsible for the safe storage of firearms reduced unintentional shooting deaths among children by 23 percent. Further, a disproportionately large share of unintentional firearm deaths happen in states where gun owners were more likely to store firearms loaded, and especially in states where owners more often stored firearms unlocked and loaded. This is true even after controlling for factors such as firearm prevalence and poverty.

    Perhaps the most promising step forward in children’s safety is the advent of smart guns. These firearms can be fired only by the owner, thereby drastically reducing the risk of accidental shootings and teenage suicides. A 2003 study examined unintentional, undetermined intent and negligent homicide firearm deaths occurring in Milwaukee County and Maryland between 1991 and 1998. The study determined that 37 percent of the deaths would have been prevented by a smart gun.

    Efforts to introduce these much safer weapons have stalled in the face of a fierce backlash from extreme gun advocates, with one gun store owner even receiving death threats for offering smart guns. The most sophisticated smart gun model, the German-made Armatix iP1 .22-caliber pistol, can be fired only while the owner is wearing an accompanying wristwatch with a built-in RFID tag. The universal adoption of such a device would drastically reduce gun deaths.

    Unfortunately, extreme gun advocates are committed to a misinformation campaign, claiming that smart guns have high failure rates. Not only is this accusation based on concerns about outdated fingerprint technology, which the Armatix iP1 doesn’t use, but this gun has passed state reliability tests with a successful firing rate of more than 99 percent.

    Toy guns, like teddy bears, have tomes of regulation dedicated to reducing the risk of fatal accidents, but real guns, the single device most responsible for accidental child fatalities, have exactly zero federal safety standards regulating their designs. In fact, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has been forbidden by Congress since 1976 to address gun safety, at the urging of the NRA. Gun manufacturers, under federal law, have since been able to choose gun designs without regard for safety or public health.

    The NRA and extreme gun advocates perpetuate a culture of fear and violence, teaching children that guns are a solution. We are seeing the results of this culture in our schools. Bullied students are bringing thousands of guns to schools. Since the Sandy Hook shooting in December 2012, there have been 74 shootings at schools, events that used to be exceedingly rare. Further, one study found that exposure to firearm violence doubles the risk that an adolescent will then in turn commit violent acts over the next two years. The death toll continues to mount.

    In the developed world, 87 percent of children younger than 14 killed by firearms live in the United States. More American children and teenagers died from gunfire in 2010—a single year—than U.S. troops in Afghanistan since 2001. Is this truly the culture we want for our children?

    Full Slate article here with links

Skeptoid On Stats

    I had reservations about writing this post. I have considered writing it a few times, only to put it away because it is a difficult subject to tackle in a single post. The subject matter is also highly politicized and very personal. But after some recent news stories and the usual politically slanted postings coming through my news feeds, I decided to tackle a small portion of the gun debate. I am going to make my best attempt at putting this through a skeptical lens, which is my aim in writing this.

    Before I chat a little bit about the data, I want to reveal my own bias. I do own guns. I am a hunter and this is my primary use for them. Though I do enjoy target and trap shooting, I rarely have time for those things. I also will reveal that I don’t think further action politically will have a great impact on any deaths associated with guns. This is my current assessment of the available data—which I will admit is weak and disjointed. I am also wary of any government solutions when it is not clear, via data and research, whether such a solution is the best or only one. I will do my best to not bring my bias into this post, but because of the nature of the subject that may not happen entirely.

    My overall assessment is we have a lot of data. The Centers for Disease Control, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and to a lesser extent private groups, all have research into deaths and injuries specifically attributed to guns. Interestingly, there is a gap in some of the CDC data due to the CDC not doing gun research for a 17 year period. Even in this the political agendas are evident. There are news stories saying President Obama lifted this “ban,” though technically there was no ban. Congress had cut funding in 1996 specifically for the amount the CDC spent on gun research, but there was no actual ban. What does remain, however, is a gap in their data.

    One problem I noticed with the data is that even with the amount available, studies typically only focused on gathering and not on connections. Looking through the FBI and BJS data, there are plenty of charts that talk about violence, homicides, firearms, race, age, and all sorts of categories. But none of these statistics include preceding data, only post event data. Every violent crime event gets a full set of data as to who committed it, where it was committed, and who the victims were. Data on what led up to the crime, which admittedly would be harder to collate, are not readily available. This I think would be important if looking for a way to reduce violence.

    Another problem is the data are often complied and reported by those either carrying a bias, trying to get ratings, or both. An example comes from some recent school violence which made national headlines. A recent school shooting (I won’t link a story here or mention the name because I am not a fan of the excess media attention given to these events) brought out a piece of data provided by a gun control lobby group which stated there have been 74 school shootings since December 2012 when another, larger school shooting happened. But as it was quickly discovered, this was a map basically of any homicide by firearm where the word school was related, such as:

    Includes an Aug. 15, 2013, incident in which police were called to a high school parking lot at 2 a.m. in Clarksville, Tennessee, where they found the body of a 38-year-old homicide victim with no links to the school.

    In another 2013 incident on the list, a 23-year-old Morehouse College student in Atlanta was shot and killed. His body was found near the college, according to news reports, but not on campus.

    CNN worked to correct this number and they came up with a much lower number of 15. The Oregonian did a good job of looking into how both numbers were derived and found neither CNN nor the lobbying group had good definitions for what qualified. They first defined their criteria in a specific manner, using these criteria:

    In how many of the cases did students or faculty face imminent danger from an armed assailant on or near school grounds?

    In that definition, they estimate the number to be about 35. They admit that some events in that set include evidence that the violence was gang-related, according to police reports. This is a much better way to look at data—by being clear in definitions and also explaining the limitations to those definitions.

    Related to the school violence numbers involving a firearm is the amount of confirmation bias that appears when discussing school firearm violence. Schools should be safe for our kids. They should be places where children can explore, learn, and grow without fear of being harmed. And when that image is damaged by an incident, it brings about an almost visceral reaction that something must be done. Is it getting worse? Let’s look at the list of total school homicides, ages 5-18, from the 1992-1993 school year through the 2009-2010 school year: 34, 29, 28, 32, 28, 34, 33, 14, 14, 16, 18, 23, 22, 21, 32, 21, 17, 17. These are all homicides at school, not just those involving firearms. For all of these years, it varies between 0.9-1.8% of all homicides in that same age group. In other words, only a very small portion of homicides actually happen at schools when compared to the overall number of homicides. One might point to other mass shootings or the fact that some victims are not killed in these incidents—which is a valid point. The data here isn’t quite as easy to obtain. A couple of other pieces of data give a partial figure. Over half of all violence, both with and without firearms, happen in or near the victim’s home or a relative’s home. Second, many acts of violence that involve a gun don’t result in physical injury; there might not be a single shot fired. So the best piece of data I can find here is this statistic: during the 2007-2011 period (the most recent completed data), there were an estimated 520,094 non-fatal violent incidents in the U.S, with 150,761 of those happening at school. But, looking at those with firearms involved, there were 107,331 total events with 6,541 happening at school. So there is quite a bit of violence at school, but very little of that violence happens with a firearm. Much more of the firearm-involved violence taking place happens elsewhere. This doesn’t tell us the ages of those involved.

    Overall, homicides of those 5-18 during the 2008-2009 school year was 1571. This is roughly half of what it was during the 1992-1993 school year. But it is still 1,571 dead kids by homicide. As I pointed out to Sean Malone, in 2010 the number of 12-to-17-year-old people killed in a firearm homicide was 708. He rightly points out that that number has decreased every year (which is good), but then used the comparison of just that age group to the entire U.S. population. He pointed out that because those deaths are only 0.000226% of the total U.S. population, it is an outlier and should not worry us. Sure, the data say the chances of any one of our children being killed by homicide using a firearm is small, but should that end the conversation? I pointed out that cystic fibrosis has a death rate of 0.00022% of caucasians. (I couldn’t find race-combined data, mostly because CF affects caucasians at a much higher rate than other races.) But we still concern ourselves with CF. Using percentages isn’t always the best way to describe data. I can say product X increases your chances of getting cancer by 100%, but if the chances go from one in a million to two in a million, that 100% doesn’t hold much meaning. I don’t think we should ignore well over 1,000 yearly deaths by firearm homicide just because it is a small percentage. That does not imply the firearm is to blame and that gun control is the answer. I simply don’t like using data in this way.

    A hard part about looking for links between the data and finding solutions is this is much more a social and psychological problem than many things skeptics normally tackle. In the case of vaccines, for example, the last couple of decades have shown only a couple hundred (or less) pediatric influenza deaths each year. The data are very clear that the more people that are vaccinated, the fewer deaths and injuries there are due to those diseases. But should we be so harsh on people when it is only a couple hundred deaths? Of course we should, because we know the cause and we know the solution to preventing most of those deaths. However, just because the cause and solution for these firearms deaths isn’t clear doesn’t mean we should negate those deaths or not look for a cause and solution (hopefully in that order).

    (Please excuse the large generalities here for a moment. I know we can all try to pull tiny trends out of the next data I am going to mention, but let’s not fall in that trap. I am going to make a few general observations and state again the data don’t tell us much about cause and effect. The only thing we have is that the data are temporally related.)

    We don’t have a great guide so far on gun control being a solution. In England, where virtually all firearms are banned, violent crime hasn’t really decreased at all. In Australia, a fairly strict version of gun control passed and is correlated with a drop in crime involving firearms. In the U.S., violent crime has gone down in the last two decades, including through a period of less gun control as some measures expired in that time frame. Often cited by gun rights advocates is Chicago, which despite its near total ban on guns has not seen a decrease in crime. I again think this is a misuse of data, as a ban in such a small area surrounded by a much larger area without the ban is not a good comparison. I compare this to Minnesota having no Sunday liquor sales. I am sure people living in central Minnesota don’t buy much in the way of alcohol on Sunday. But if one lives on the border with Wisconsin, it isn’t difficult to get access to liquor on Sunday. Chicago, to me, is not a good example to use for the effect gun control has on violence. Because control laws are inconsistent, and because the data act inconsistently with control laws in various countries, I don’t think anyone could reach a good conclusion to the effect gun control has on violence. And that’s for both sides: data of violence going up or down after laws are put into effect is not clear. Let’s not use weak data to make very large decisions.

    Another claim that many anti-science people and even the media pushes on the public is the correlation between antidepressants and firearm violence. After certain school-violence events, I’ve seen reports of the assailants having been treated with some sort of antidepressant or ADHD medication. Because of the black box warning these drugs carry, the assumption is that the medications drove them over the edge. Because we still have much to learn about brain chemistry, I don’t think we can definitively answer the question if these medications are contributing to these incidents. But we have a couple pieces of data to compare. Over the last couple of decades, the number of available antidepressants and the number of prescriptions for those drugs has increased markedly. In that same period, violent crime in general, including with firearms, has gone down significantly. Other studies even show a decrease in suicide rates as prescriptions have gone up. So even if these drugs caused a chemical imbalance which drives people to violence, the net effect could be to prevent violence more than it causes it. Air bags actually cause a few dozen deaths every year, but they also save thousands. We should always take the net benefit when looking at the data.

    Some activists will try to blame video game violence. I don’t have a good way to measure the level of violence in a game that would qualify it as a game capable of driving someone to commit an act of violence in real life. But, we do have overall sales. From 2000 to 2008, video game sales went from $20 billion to $50 billion in the U.S. In that same time, all violence, including with firearms, and in all age groups fell. This, like the antidepressant case, is a correlation. While correlations are helpful, they are not generally definitive, especially when confounding factors are difficult to control. Again, in highly publicized shooting cases, the shooters are very often into video games with heavy violence and shooting. But with the overall data one could conclude that these outlets for aggression prevent violence—at least with the same weight that activists use to say they cause violence because of the correlation that shooters often play these games.

    Other causes for the reduction in crime have been proposed, but are not easily verified. For example, the book Freakonomics (2005) takes on a study, published by one of the authors, in which the legalization of abortion is correlated with a reduction in crime. It has recieved some criticism in its methods and data analysis. Another set of studies have correlated the removal of lead from gasoline and paint as a cause for the reduction in crime. The interesting thing is in both cases is a time delay that matches pretty well. Is it both? Is it neither? This is not an easy thing to determine.

    In the end, the hard data available attest that violent crime, including with firearms has gone down on a pretty consistent basis. Overall violence has also gone down. The amount of school violence has gone down in similar proportions. The amount of non-firearm violence far exceeds violence involving a firearm. Most firearm violence doesn’t involve shooting, but instead the presence of a firearm. This reduction trend is one we should continue and accelerate if we can.

    With these hard data and some hypotheses as to why this reduction is happening, we should continue to study violence, the data gathered, and the reason for the reduction. We should see if we can further reduce violence and accelerate it if possible.

    I wrote this post because I don’t like misuse of data, especially as a way to shut down the conversation about violence, including firearm violence. Firearms hold a unique place in the minds of many, both those for and against their use for any reason. The social construct is one part of the conversation. It is not a reasonable position to say “the odds of someone getting shot is so small—less than dying in a car accident—so no need to do anything.” The odds are not zero and there are thousands killed by firearms each year. It is not a reasonable position to say “one school shooting is too many so ban all guns.” Guns have legitimate uses for sport and have been used for protection. If we banned every object with the potential to cause harm we would be without objects. There is a risk reward for everything. Using labels like “assault weapons” or “gun violence” only confuses the issue and doesn’t match the data or reality. Whenever something is framed in the aspect of fear, we shouldn’t react with fear. Instead, we ought to ask “Why are they trying to frighten me?” (Thanks to fellow blogger Craig Good for this question)

    I want the conversation to continue because something must be working—violence continues to decline. My concern is that decisions based on fear and not on good data and good science could actually reverse the trend, even if the intentions are good. The numbers show we still have a very large violence problem. As a recent incident in southern Minnesota highlighted, it doesn’t require a firearm, or even an occurrence of violence to cause both fear and harm. (A student left a small explosive device on school grounds that didn’t go off, but he had a much larger cache of explosive material in a storage unit, which was volatile and could have damaged a significant area around the storage unit if it had detonated.) The data I see doesn’t lead me towards any single cause or solution. We need to be aware of our own biases, examine the issue, decide on what research should be done next (hopefully with reduced bias as well), and make measured decisions based on science and not on emotion. That is what scientists and skeptics push for in all areas of study, including social ones such as this.

    I wish I had something more profound than that. But that’s it. This issue charges people’s emotions, but what the data tell us is that something is working. Let’s try to find the thing or things that are working. Science can help us with that. We have good medications, but we don’t stop looking for better ones using science. We have safer cars than in the past, but we keep looking for new ways to make them even safer using science. We are reducing violence, let’s look for ways to improve that using science.

Bill Gates Takes On The NRA

    It was reported Monday that Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder and incredibly wealthy guy, and with his wife, Melinda, have given $1 million to Initiative 594 in Washington state. The ballot initiative, if passed by voters on November 4 (and it currently enjoys overwhelming support), will require universal background checks for all firearm purchases in the state.

    Gates is only the latest Washington billionaire to give to the effort, with original Amazon investor Nick Hanauer providing crucial early funding, and more recently upping his overall donation to $1.4 million. Additionally, Gates’s Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, has provided $500,000 for the cause.

    But Gates’s fame brings more attention and further legitimizes the initiative in a way that almost nobody else could. Once the Gates Foundation made it a priority to combat malaria around the world in 2000, it brought down deaths due to the insect-borne disease by 20 percent in 11 years, saving the lives of 1 million African children in the process.

    Gates has the ability to grab headlines and make an issue go viral with the constant media coverage he receives, and the financial ability, if he wins, to fund similar efforts around the country. His involvement could be the answer to the public health crisis that makes American children 93 percent of those murdered in the 26 high-income countries around the world.

    Meanwhile, the NRA has…Chuck Norris, doing its “Trigger The Vote” Campaign. An actor, in the sense that he showed up in films, who was last seen round-housing Vietnamese extras in B-movies in the ’80s, back when he was only pushing 50. In more recent times, the more Methuselah-esque-appearing Norris has spent his time warning us of 1,000 years of darkness if President Obama is reelected. (He was. Boo!)

    That, in short, is why the guy with the French-sounding name, National Rifle Association head honcho Wayne LaPierre, is probably somewhere drowning his sorrows in his Pernod. Because Gates’ involvement in this issue is just about the last thing LaPierre needs.

    Already, the NRA has shown its disdain for anyone with the guts and resources to take on its political cartel of legally bribed legislators around the country. It was used to having the field to itself financially in the 2000s, until along came New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. After seeing his constituents and police force victimized by lax gun laws out of state, lobbied for by the NRA, he decided it was time to do something.

    The now former mayor’s activism had led to the ire of LaPierre & Company, who’ve just released a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign blasting Bloomberg, replete with his supposed sneering at “flyover country” in between the coasts. Which LaPierre clearly doesn’t do while receiving his million-dollar-plus compensation in the wealthy Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.

    Ironically, it was in Virginia where Bloomberg’s organization, Everytown for Gun Safety, had one of its biggest victories, when it elected a governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general in 2013. None of whom thought a 12-year old should be able to open-carry an Uzi in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, because of, you know, freedom. Suddenly those who agree with the 90 percent of the country who support universal background checks had access to similar, if not greater, financial resources than those who pledged their allegiance to an arms dealer-funded front group.

    Bloomberg is worth $33 billion, but if that’s not enough, Gates is worth well over two times that amount. Who knows, with that kind of dough, maybe even measures that “only” enjoy 56 percent support like bans on assault weapons and/or high-capacity magazines could pass via direct voting by uncorrupted American citizens. Or perhaps state legislators and members of Congress who bend easily to the will of these Lords of War could be swapped out for those who live in a closer neighborhood to the best interests of the American populace.

    Likely the NRA will try to do to Gates what it has attempted to do to Bloomberg for a few years now, and seek to make this fight about him and not its right-wing radicalism in the service of avarice. He’s a billionaire trying to influence our political process, after all, unlike Manhattan resident David Koch, who along with his brother Charles has polluted our political process to no end, including funding the NRA.

    Sure, in an ideal world big money wouldn’t play such an outsize role in our elections, such as this hugely important ballot initiative in Washington state. But that’s not what the NRA wants. It just wants its big money still to be all that decides the outcome, and it isn’t. Which is why Wayne LaPierre’s having a bad day.

Toys Are Regulated But Not Guns

    A little girl was given an automatic weapon to play with this week. She killed a man. Only one first world country would allow such insanity to continue.

    Yesterday afternoon, the "NRA Women" Twitter account sent out a simple and yet ghoulish message to its followers. With an embedded link to an article on their website, it reminded its adherents of "7 ways children can have fun at the shooting range."

    No matter that merely two days earlier, at the Bullets & Burgers Gun Range 50 miles outside of Las Vegas in Arizona, a 9-year old girl had been handed an Uzi, lost control while firing it in fully automatic mode, and accidentally shot the instructor standing next to her in the head (he later died after being airlifted to hospital).

    Hell, the gun range didn't even shut down. Because this is gun country; where the bodies are moved to the side and we just keep on shooting.

    Needles to say, no other high-income country behaves like this with deadly weapons. The United States itself would never do so with any other item that caused so much murder and mayhem.

    Just last week a mom in Connecticut was charged with 10 counts of risk of injury to a minor for throwing a party for her 15-year old daughter and her friends where a condom was handed out and booze was readily available. Meanwhile, the parents of the 9-year old at Bullets & Burgers are free as birds. Too bad for the Connecticut party mom that she didn’t have the good sense to hand out shotguns instead.

    The horrific shooting accident is not even the first incident of its kind. In 2008, an 8-year old boy shot himself in the head while also attempting to fire an Uzi at a target. This time the watching gun instructor escaped injury.

    Worse than these newsworthy accidents, is what we allow to happen every day in this country.

    Everytown for Gun Safety released a report in June that traced Centers for Disease Control statistics from 2007 to 2011, which found that an average of 62 children under 15 were shot and killed each year. That's more than one child a week. Around two thirds of these accidental deaths happened in the home or vehicle of the family, with mostly unsecured guns. Over two thirds of those deaths could have been prevented if the guns had been been stored safely.

    We have allowed this child-like mentality to govern the issue.

    Tell me, would we allow this to happen with any other consumer product? If a toy chokes a few children it is (rightly) pulled from the market. This has occurred with bean bag chairs, children's sweaters, and the Coco The Monkey Teething Toy. My seven-year-old son still can't go on all the roller coasters he wants, because he is a few inches too short. But no worry! Once he hits eight, we can head on over to Bullets & Burgers, and who knows, maybe they'll let him strap on a bazooka.

    Anyone who can't see how corrupted our polices are by the arms-dealer front group known as the NRA isn't looking very hard. Guns are the only consumer product not allowed to be regulated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission—meaning only the manufacturers profiting from the sales can recall a gun, even if it is exploding in your face. Our bought-off legislators in Washington, mostly Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats, gave the gun industry blanket immunity in 2004 from wrongful death lawsuits--something no other industry enjoys. What this means in reality, is that they can act with all the negligence their greed-filled hearts can muster, and nobody can do a thing.

    In May of 2013, a 5-year old boy accidentally shot and killed his 2-year old sister in a Kentucky town, with a Crickett rifle that is made and marketed for kids. You read that right, this gun is specifically made and marketed to kids. Under the slogan "My First Rifle" you can buy one from Keystone Sporting Arms in hot pink, should that be the preference of your mature, online-window shopping 5-year old.

    We allow this. In a modern democracy. For the same reason we don't have background checks to stop murderers and terrorists from buying guns, or require people to report a lost or stolen gun, or stop people from buying a sniper rifle that can shoot someone from 10 football fields away.

    We have allowed our culture to be manhandled by people who have purchased and repackaged our history. They don't want you to know that as recently as the 1970s concealed carry in public was rare, and we took a similar stance on deadly weapons as many other similar countries. But then the NRA was taken over by a gun nut who had actually shot a kid dead in cold blood when he was younger. He brought with him the radicalized, right-wing mentality of a child, one that devalues human life and proclaims, as he did, that some dead people here, there, and everywhere is just "the price we pay for freedom."

    Interestingly, Canada, Japan, England, Australia and the Netherlands somehow remain free without paying this price.

    Since then, we have allowed this child-like mentality to govern the issue, so it is no surprise that children would have access to guns.

    Hopefully this incident, like all the massacres we could have prevented, will wake people up and they'll join a growing movement to turn back this madness. Bill Gates signed on the other day.

    If not, we'll continue to live in what George Carlin described as a "strange culture", where we regulate toy guns better than, in his words, "the fucking real ones!" That in itself would be another tragedy.

Gun Deaths Exceed Car Deaths 2015

    ACCORDING to data gathered by the Centres for Disease Control (CDC), deaths caused by cars in America are in long-term decline. Improved technology, tougher laws and less driving by young people have all led to safer streets and highways. Deaths by guns, though—the great majority suicides, accidents or domestic violence—have been trending slightly upwards. This year, if the trend continues, they will overtake deaths on the roads.

    The Centre for American Progress first spotted last February that the lines would intersect. Now, on its reading, new data to the end of 2012 support the view that guns will surpass cars this year as the leading killer of under 25s. Bloomberg Government has gone further. Its compilation of the CDC data in December concluded that guns would be deadlier for all age groups.

    Comparing the two national icons, cars and guns, yields “a statistic that really resonates with people”, says Chelsea Parsons, co-author of the report for the Centre for American Progress. Resonance is certainly needed. There are about 320m people in the United States, and nearly as many civilian firearms. And although the actual rate of gun ownership is declining, enthusiasts are keeping up the number in circulation. Black Friday on November 28th kicked off such a shopping spree that the FBI had to carry out 175,000 instant background checks (three checks a second), a record for that day, just for sales covered by the extended Brady Act of 1998, the only serious bit of gun-curbing legislation passed in recent history.

    Many sales escape that oversight, however. Everytown for Gun Safety, a movement backed by Mike Bloomberg, a former mayor of New York, has investigated loopholes in online gun sales and found that one in 30 users of Armslist classifieds has a criminal record that forbids them to own firearms. Private reselling of guns draws no attention, unless it crosses state lines.

    William Vizzard, a professor of criminal justice at California State University at Sacramento, points out that guns also don’t wear out as fast as cars. “I compare a gun to a hammer or a crowbar,” he says. “Even if you stopped making guns today, you might not see a real change in the number of guns for decades.”

    Motor vehicles, because they are operated on government-built roads, have been subject to licensing and registration, in the interests of public safety, for more than a century. But guns are typically kept at home. That private space is shielded by the Fourth Amendment just as “the right to bear arms” is protected by the Second, making government control difficult.

    Car technologies and road laws are ever-evolving: in 2014, for example, the National Highways Traffic Safety Administration announced its plan to phase in mandatory rear-view cameras on new light vehicles, while New York City lowered its speed limit for local roads. By contrast, safety features on firearms—such as smartguns unlocked by an owner’s thumbprint or a radio-frequency encryption—are opposed by the National Rifle Association, whose allies in Congress also block funding for the sort of public-health research that might show, in even clearer detail, the cost of America’s love affair with guns.

Blocking The Path To Suicide

    Every year, nearly 40,000 Americans kill themselves. The majority are men, and most of them use guns. In fact, more than half of all gun deaths in the United States are suicides.

    Experts and laymen have long assumed that people who died by suicide will ultimately do it even if temporarily deterred. “People think if you’re really intent on dying, you’ll find a way,” said Cathy Barber, the director of the Means Matters campaign at Harvard Injury Control Research Center.

    Prevention, it follows, depends largely on identifying those likely to harm themselves and getting them into treatment. But a growing body of evidence challenges this view.

    Suicide can be a very impulsive act, especially among the young, and therefore difficult to predict. Its deadliness depends more upon the means than the determination of the suicide victim.

    Now many experts are calling for a reconsideration of suicide-prevention strategies. While mental health and substance abuse treatment must always be important components in treating suicidality, researchers like Ms. Barber are stressing another avenue: “means restriction.”

    Instead of treating individual risk, means restriction entails modifying the environment by removing the means by which people usually die by suicide. The world cannot be made suicide-proof, of course. But, these researchers argue, if the walkway over a bridge is fenced off, a struggling college freshman cannot throw herself over the side. If parents leave guns in a locked safe, a teenage son cannot shoot himself if he suddenly decides life is hopeless.

    With the focus on who dies by suicide, these experts say, not enough attention has been paid to restricting the means to do it — particularly access to guns.

    “You can reduce the rate of suicide in the United States substantially, without attending to underlying mental health problems, if fewer people had guns in their homes and fewer people who are at risk for suicide had access to guns in their home,” said Dr. Matthew Miller, a director of Harvard Injury Control Research Center and a professor of health sciences and epidemiology at Northeastern University.

    About 90 percent of the people who try suicide and live ultimately never die by suicide. If the people who died had not had easy access to lethal means, researchers like Dr. Miller reason, most would still be alive.

    The public has long held the opposite perception. In 2006, researchers at the Harvard center published an opinion survey about people who jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. Seventy-four percent of respondents believed that most or all jumpers would have completed suicide some other way if they had been deterred.

    “People think of suicide in this linear way, as if you get more and more depressed and go on to create a more specific plan,” Ms. Barber said.

    In fact, suicide is often a convergence of factors leading to a sudden, tragic event. In one study of people who survived a suicide attempt, almost half reported that the whole process, from the first suicidal thought to the final act, took 10 minutes or less.

    Among those who thought about it a little longer (say, for about an hour), more than three-quarters acted within 10 minutes once the decision was made.

    “We’re very bad at predicting who from a group of at-risk people will go on to complete suicide,” Dr Miller said. “We can say it will be about 10 out of the 100 who are at risk. But which 10, we don’t know.”

    Dr. Igor Galynker, the director of biological psychiatry at Mount Sinai Beth Israel, noted that in one study, 60 percent of patients who were judged to be at low risk died of suicide after their discharge from an acute care psychiatric unit.

    “The assessments are not good,” he said. So Dr. Galynker and his colleagues are developing a novel suicide assessment to predict imminent risk, based upon new findings about the acute suicidal state.

    “What people experience before attempting suicide is a combination of panic, agitation and franticness,” he said. “A desire to escape from unbearable pain and feeling trapped.”

    Sometimes, depression isn’t even in the picture. In one study, 60 percent of college students who said they were thinking about ways to kill themselves tested negative for depression.

    “There are kids for whom it’s very difficult to predict suicide — there doesn’t seem to be that much that is wrong with them,” said Dr. David Brent, an adolescent psychiatrist who studies suicide at the University of Pittsburgh.

    Dr. Brent’s research showed that 40 percent of children younger than 16 who died by suicide did not have a clearly definable psychiatric disorder.

    What they did have was a loaded gun in the home.

    “If the kids are under 16, the availability of a gun is more important than psychiatric disorder,” Dr. Brent said. “They’re not suicidal one minute, then they are. Or they’re mad and they have a gun available.”

    Availability is a consistent factor in how most people choose to attempt suicide, said Ms. Barber, regardless of age. People trying to die by suicide tend to choose not the most effective method, but the one most at hand.

    “Some methods have a case fatality rate as low as 1 or 2 percent,” she said. “With a gun, it’s closer to 85 or 90 percent. So it makes a difference what you’re reaching for in these low-planned or unplanned suicide attempts.”

    Statistically, having a gun in the home increases the probability of suicide for all age groups. If the gun is unloaded and locked away, the risk is reduced. If there is no gun in the house at all, the suicide risk goes down even further.

    Findings like these are far from popular. Taxpayers resist spending public money on infrastructure that they believe will not prevent people determined to die by suicide, and the political tide has turned against gun control. But growing evidence of suicide’s unpredictability, coupled with studies showing that means restriction can work, may leave public health officials little choice if they wish to reduce suicide rates.

    Ken Baldwin, who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and lived, told reporters that he knew as soon as he had jumped that he had made a terrible mistake. He wanted to live. Mr. Baldwin was lucky.

    Ms. Barber tells another story: On a friend’s very first day as an emergency room physician, a patient was wheeled in, a young man who had shot himself in a suicide attempt. “He was begging the doctors to save him,” she said. But they could not.

GOP Hypocrisy

    “Get rid of gun free zones,” Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump tweeted after a gunman massacred five in Chattanooga last month. “Gun-free zones an easy target for killers” an opinion headline on Fox News read after a white supremacist shot up a black South Carolina church and killed nine. Conservative sites also blamed gun-free zones after massacres at multiple movie theaters and other shootings.

    If conservatives are so convinced that gun-free zones attract killers, then why do so many conservative places and events ban guns?

    Across the country, from conservative confabs to Republican presidential libraries and even to gun shows, loaded weapons are frequently prohibited. When an explanation is given, the reason is invariably for the safety of visitors. Here is a list of some of those conservative places that ban loaded guns:

    Gun Shows- Perhaps the most surprising conservative venue that bans loaded weapons are gun shows. Crossroads Gun Show, which tours across the country, explained why even concealed carry permit holders can’t bring loaded weapons into the event: “Safety is our Number One Priority, and a safe environment in the show can only be maintained if there are no loaded guns in the show.” This past weekend, gun shows from Florida to California to Ohio prohibited visitors to carry loaded firearms.

    Political Conferences- Conservative conferences frequently prohibit guests from bringing firearms. One recent example was the Morning in Nevada PAC’s Inaugural Basque Fry, a sold-out event featuring GOP presidential candidates Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, George Pataki, Ted Cruz, and Scott Walker. The event’s FAQ page answered the question “Can I bring licensed firearms?” with a simple “No.”

    George W. Bush Presidential Library- Though Bush was a strong proponent of gun rights, his presidential library in Dallas demands that all visitors leave their firearms at home. According to a sign posted outside, guns are prohibited “For the security of our visitors, staff and facility.”

    Republican Conventions- Firearms were banned at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, even as delegates inside passed language into the party platform affirming that Republicans “acknowledge, support, and defend the law-abiding citizen’s God-given right of self-defense.” State Republican conventions also regularly forbid guns. Indiana Republicans recently enacted legislation allowing guns in school parking lots, but held their 2014 convention in a facility that forbid firearms.

    Trump Hotels And Golf Courses- Despite Trump’s vociferous opposition to gun-free zones, numerous Trump hotels and golf courses, from Chicago to Los Angeles to Honolulu, do not allow firearms on the premises, even for concealed-carry permitholders.

    NRA Events- Though the National Rifle Association said gun-free zones “encourage criminals and psychopaths,” the group held some of its annual meeting events in Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, which bans weapons. The year prior, the NRA held events in Indianapolis’ Lucas Oil Stadium, another gun-free zone.

    Town Halls- Guns are frequently prohibited at GOP congressional town hall meetings, especially after the shooting of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) in 2011. Even stalwart conservatives like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and former Rep. Allen West (R-FL) opted to ban firearms at their town halls.

    Presidential Campaign Stops- Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R), a prominent gun advocate who has signed legislation expanding gun rights, prohibited “guns, ammunition, fireworks, electric stun guns, mace, selfie-sticks, martial arts weapons/devices, or knives of any size” from his presidential campaign kick-off event. Other GOPers, like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) in 2012, have also banned concealed firearms at their events.

    GOP Debates- Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena, which hosted the first Republican presidential debate earlier this month, declared that “firearms and other weapons of any kind are strictly forbidden.” Guns will also be forbidden in the upcoming GOP debate held in Colorado.

    Congress- Republicans enjoy a majority in both wings of Congress and could change the rules to permit firearms on Capitol grounds if they wished. It would not be without precedent; until 1967, there was no rule prohibiting guns in or around Congress. However, strict security was implemented in the early 1980s after a series of high-profile shootings and bombings.

    Of course, there’s a good reason why many conservatives don’t actually want to have guns in their own areas or events. Contrary the NRA’s claims, the vast majority of mass shootings don’t happen in gun-free zones. There’s also no evidence that a mass shooter ever chose his target because it prohibited firearms.

    Instead, study after study has shown that more guns leads to more killings. In addition, even armed civilian bystanders with good intentions of stopping a shooter can wind up exacerbating already violent situations, as nearly happened in the Giffords shooting.

The ‘exceptionally American’ problem of mass shootings

    On Sunday, criminal justice professor Adam Lankford stood in front of a crowd of sociologists to explain how American culture contributes to the all-too-frequent American mass shootings. It’s not just that we have a lot of guns, he said — though he does believe that the high rates of firearm ownership are partially to blame. It’s the social strains of American life — the false promise of the American dream, which guarantees a level of success that can’t always be achieved through hard work and sheer willpower; the devotion to individualism and the desire for fame or notoriety.

    Millions of Americans feel these strains and never commit a crime. But for a small handful, they breed the kind of resentment and fury that can explode into violence.

    When an embittered former Roanoke reporter opened fire on his onetime colleagues three days later, interrupting their live broadcast to ensure that his attack made it on TV, it was as though he was trying to prove Lankford’s point.

    [The shooter, 41-year-old Vester L. Flanagan II, embodied every problem Lankford had identified in his global review of public mass shootings since 1966. He was reported to be frustrated with his patchy career as a television news reporter. He aspired to fame — either behind an anchor desk, or, according to photos shared on his Twitter account, through acting and modeling — and he got it, in a way, via the TV and GoPro footage of the slayings.

    Flanagan admired other mass shooters whose names have become inextricably linked to those of the schools where they committed crimes. And although he was the one who allegedly raised a gun and pulled the trigger, ending two lives, he saw himself as a victim. “WDBJ7 made me snap . . . they sure did. They are responsible for all of this!!!” reads a memo attributed to Flanagan in which he raged at former coworkers who he said harassed him for his race and sexuality (Flanagan was black and gay) and decried the killing of nine parishioners at a black church in Charleston, S.C., earlier this year.

    At three deaths, Flanagan’s alleged attack does not qualify as mass killing — in the macabre hierarchy of violent crimes, a shooter must take four lives to be granted that title (this is according to Lankford’s definition — definitions vary). But according to Lankford’s analysis, he was the archetype of the American public mass shooter, someone who sought fame and a kind of meaning through death when he could not find it in his own life.

    Lankford, a criminal justice professor at the University of Alabama, is the author of a new study on what he calls the “exceptionally American problem” of public mass shootings. The study was presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association this week and will be published in peer reviewed journals later this year.

    The United States, according to Lankford’s analysis, is home to just 5 percent of the world’s people but 31 percent of its public mass shooters. Even more stunning, between 1966 and 2012, 62 percent of all school and workplace shooters were American. At 90 mass shooters in less than 50 years, the U.S. has five times as many as the next highest country on the list (the Phillippines).

    One explanation is Americans’ high rate of firearm ownership. All five of the countries with the largest number of guns per capita (of which the U.S. is No. 1) ranked among the top 15 countries for public mass shootings, including two countries with reputations for safety, Switzerland and Finland. Many other studies have found a correlation between local gun ownership rates and deaths from shootings.

    But that’s not enough to explain why mass shootings happen so much more often here than anywhere else. There are also cultural factors at work, Lankford argues. The things that Americans believe make us exceptional — our emphasis on individualism, our sense of destiny, our wealth-and-fame-based standards for success — also contribute.

    The connection begins with something called “strain theory,” developed by sociologist Richard Merton in the 1930s. According to the theory, Lankford says, “deviance occurs because individuals who strive to meet culturally defined goals lack the means to do so.” This is especially salient in the U.S., where the “American Dream” promises a better life than one’s parents for anyone who is willing to work for it. According to a 2010 survey, 81 percent of American high school students believe they will have a “great paying job” by age 25. A similar survey conducted in 2014 found that 26 percent of high schoolers expected that they would soon be famous. Nearly one third of college freshman expect to eventually get an M.D. or PhD (though only about 5 percent do).

    “There’s a sense in which these aspirations are subject to that axiom that the bigger they are the harder they fall,” Lankford said. “If you’re reaching for the stars and you come up short, that’s perhaps more frustrating and devastating.”

    The reality is that very few people achieve the wealth, fame and prestige we’re all socialized to believe is our destiny. When the socially sanctioned path toward success doesn’t take people where they want to go, some resort to other means. Negative social interactions — lack of friends and mentors, failures in school — and mental illness can exacerbate the problem, making them believe that “their dreams are hopeless,” Lankford said.

    The strain theory framework has traditionally been used to explain high rates of crime, particularly in poor and marginalized communities, but Lankford says it’s particularly apt to describe mass killings. Unlike most other offenders, shooters are likely to leave behind memos or manifestos purporting to explain their actions. And most of them, including Flanagan, cite negative social interactions and blocked goals as their primary motives. “They are in real pain, but they’re eager to blame that pain on those around them,” Lankford said.

    Workplaces and schools — or, in Flanagan’s case, former colleagues — are the symbolic sources of their strain; by attacking them, shooters seek to exact revenge on the people and institutions they believe have kept them down. In the U.S., the strain of unmet expectations and unrealized goals is more pressing than perhaps anywhere else, so it makes a gruesome kind of sense that this country is home to nearly two thirds of the world’s school and workplace shooters.

    The brazen violence of mass shootings sates another particularly American craving: the desire for fame at any cost. “The priority of fame is more common and stronger in the U.S. than perhaps in any other culture in the world,” Lankford said. And at the same time, “the distinction between fame and infamy seems to be disappearing.”

    We are the country that gave rise to reality television and the phrase “I’m not here to make friends,” Lankford points out. We already reward people for being arrogant, aggressive and vitriolic with book deals and contracts for their own clothing lines and incessant news coverage. It’s arguably easier to become infamous in the United States than it is to win fame. Yes, your name with forever be tinged with tones of scorn, but “all publicity is good publicity,” right? “It’s probably not surprising that, for a small percentage of people, they’ll take the next step of guaranteeing themselves fame by killing,” Lankford concluded, soberly. “… They fantasize about going out in a blaze of glory.”

    It’s not difficult to imagine that Flanagan, as Lankford put it, entertained these kinds of “delusions of grandeur.” He sought to become a television news anchor — a public, high profile and prestigious position. In the memo sent to ABC News, he described himself as a victim of a conspiracy of racist and homophobic harassment, using phrases like “out to get me.”

    Ultimately, the Charleston massacre — a horrific attack on a black community — convinced him that his aspirations were in fact hopeless. There was nothing else to do but take his life, and those of 24-year-old Alison Parker, a bright reporter and beloved daughter, and 27-year-old Adam Ward, a camera man with a fiancee and an easy laugh.

    “[I] tried to pull myself up by the bootstraps,” Flanagan wrote in his memo, according to ABC, but, “The damage was already done and when someone gets to this point, there is nothing that can be said or done to change their sadness to happiness.”

Compulsory Gun Insurance

    Most of the time, if you act fearless enough and choose your battles wisely, the majority of schoolyard bullies can be faced down. But I learned as an out-of-the-closet gay teen in south Georgia in the early 1980s that some bullies are just too big to fight. They’re too strong, too ruthless and insane, too well-connected with school administration or otherwise unfairly advantaged against those who would stand against them. It is then that one must resort to a tactic I like to call “Let’s you and him fight”.

    If you alone are not strong enough to vanquish your opponent, you must find someone who is – and then find a way to set them against each other. Neither, probably, will ever be your friend. However, once they have occupied each other’s attentions, one is generally once again at liberty to roam the school halls unmolested while dressed like Siouxsie Sioux’s sparkly kid brother. This tactic works beyond the cafeteria – and it’s how we as Americans should finally fight back against the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the other pro-gun lobbies keeping our country armed to the teeth and unwilling to hear any sense regarding gun safety laws, even as gun violence in the US remains disproportionately high: we must find something big, ugly and ruthless enough to take on the NRA.

    I believe the insurance industry may be our only hope.

    Let everyone in this country keep their guns, but force them to insure those guns. It seems so obvious when you think about it. We insure our cars, our houses, our boats and bodies, even our plane tickets and rental cars. And some of those policies are legally mandated. We should absolutely require gun owners to pay against the indemnity they might incur when their gun does what it is statistically most likely to do – kills or injures them, or someone else.

    Unlike all of the other things that we insure – cars, major electronics or art collections – guns only do one thing. They kill. They are lumps of metal that fire hot fragments of lead at lethal velocities in order to crack bone, explode soft tissues and end life.

    Gun violence costs the US an estimated $229bn every year . Insurance companies, do you hear that? That’s a lot of dosh you could be profiting from. Break out your actuary tables, let’s get indemnity-ed up!

    You see those guys over there, those NRA members? Each one of them is a walking, talking, gun-polishing wallet full of cash. How much do you suppose would be the maximum dollar amount of damage that could spew forth from the barrel of an AR-15 in one fiscal year?

    This could be your next great revenue stream, insurance giants. You might even make enough money to let Americans have something like decent, affordable healthcare.

    It’s time to make bull-headed gun owners pay for their treasured toys’ potential to kill. Think of the premiums that await you, the deductibles, the hours you can make gun owners wait on hold for incompetent service! It might make some second-guess their need to open-carry. Of course, they could always show up and shoot you (forcing you to pay yourself), but that’d hardly be a blip in the revenue stream.

    So, get in that ring, insurance guys. In this corner, we have the grifting, cheating, predatory insurance industry! In the opposite corner, the bullying, neurotic, paranoid but very, very heavily armed gun lobby!

    My money is on the bureaucrats. I believe the insurance companies with their legions of parsimonious bean-counters can accomplish in red tape what a million marching demonstrators with our signs and good intentions never could. Two scams enter – one scam leaves. And America? We win.

Study Gun Violence?

    President Obama challenged the media to do the math on the number of deaths by terrorism in the US compared to gun violence, and data shows that gun deaths are a bigger threat to the American people than terrorism.

    Zack Beauchamp at Vox took President Obama up on his challenge to the media yesterday, when the defiant President asked news organizations to do the math on deaths by terrorism versus deaths by gun violence after yet another mass shooting, this time at Umpqua Community College in Oregon.

    President Obama said:

    I would ask news organizations because I won’t put these facts forward. Have news organizations tally up the number of Americans who have been killed through terrorist attacks in the last decade, and the number of Americans who have been killed by gun violence and post those side by side on your news reports. This won’t be information coming from me. It will be coming from you.

    Obama pointed out, we have “spent over a trillion dollars, and passed countless laws, and devote entire agencies to preventing terrorist attacks on our soil, and rightfully so. And yet we have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths. How can that be?”

    So Vox did the math and it is astonishing:

    More than 10,000 Americans are killed every year by gun violence. By contrast, so few Americans have been killed by terrorist attacks since 9/11 that when you chart the two together, the terrorism death count approximates zero for every year except 2001. This comparison, if anything, understates the gap: Far more Americans die every year from (easily preventable) gun suicides than gun homicides.

    In the aftermath of yet another mass shooting, Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA), Chair of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, called on Congressional Republicans to do something for the love of God. Anything to “act on commonsense gun violence prevention laws”.

    “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Congressional Republicans have done nothing over and over again and, predictably, the results have been the same: more innocent lives lost, more families forever changed, and more mass gun violence.

    “Hours before the UCC shooting 147 bipartisan Members of Congress sent Speaker Boehner a letter urging him to act on gun violence prevention. The five brave co-authors of our background check bill notwithstanding, Republicans have done nothing. Republicans have a majority in Congress, and a White House and Democratic Caucus willing to work with them. All they need to do is get off their hands and act.”

    Republicans took action, immediately after the South Carolina church massacre, in fact, to make sure that no money could be spent on researching gun violence. In their report on their continued ban for funding of gun violence, “Republicans wrote that the ban is to protect the rights granted by the Second Amendment,” the Hill reported.

    “The restriction is to prevent activity that would undertake activities (to include data collection) for current or future research, including under the title ‘gun violence prevention,’ that could be used in any manner to result in a future policy, guidelines, or recommendations to limit access to guns, ammunition, or to create a list of gun owners,” the report says.

    Well, we wouldn’t want to have any data or limit access to guns or keep track of people who own them. That would result in accountability and reason-driven policies, which would not help the NRA one bit.

    Republicans are financially attached to NRA talking points, such as if only everyone was armed, and the manufacturers behind the NRA were even richer! However, as CNN pointed out in an unrelated article:

    Japan has very strict gun control laws, and in a land of 127 million people, there were six gun-related deaths last year, according to statistics by the National Police Agency. The possibility of the gang war reigniting frightens the general public considerably.

    That’s not a one-off or an accident. In a separate article, Vox detailed, “America has six times as many firearm homicides as Canada, and 15 times as many as Germany… Extensive reviews of the research by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Center suggest the answer is pretty simple: The US is an outlier on gun violence because it has way more guns than other developed nations.”

    Got it? That’s all thanks to the NRA propaganda, their profit motive, and the purchased lawmakers who puppet for them, while enabling American terrorism on other Americans.

    Congress isn’t even allowed to do a study on gun violence.

Gun Free Society

    Every time there is a mass shooting, gun-control advocates argue again for legislation. But almost every time, opponents can argue that this shooter wouldn’t have been blocked from buying a gun, or that this gun would not have been on anyone’s banned list — and so why waste time (and political capital) on irrelevant restrictions?

    To be clear, I believe the NRA is wrong on this, and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence is right. Modest restrictions can help and have helped. The one-gun-a-month law can reduce crime. The gun-show loophole should be closed, and closing it would prevent some criminals from obtaining weapons. Every gun in a home with children should have a trigger lock.

    But how many members of Congress will risk their jobs for modest, incremental reform that may or may not show up as a blip on the following year’s murder statistics? We’ve learned the answer to that question.

    Fine, you say, but then why would those same members commit political suicide by embracing something bigger?

    They won’t, of course. Congress will not lead this change. There has to be a cultural shift. Only then will Congress and the Supreme Court follow.

    As we’ve seen over the past 15 years with same-sex marriage, such deep cultural change is difficult — and possible. Wyatt Earp, the frontier mentality, prying my cold dead fingers — I get all that. But Australia was a pioneer nation, too, and gave up its guns. Societies change, populations evolve.

    And people are not immune, over time, to reason. Given how guns decimate poor black communities every day — not just when there are mass shootings, but every day — this is a civil rights issue. Given how many small children shoot themselves or their siblings accidentally, it is a family issue. Given the suicides that could be prevented, it is a mental health issue. On average 55 Americans shoot themselves to death every day. Every day!

    The Supreme Court, which has misread the Second Amendment in its recent decisions, would have to revisit the issue. The court has corrected itself before, and if public opinion shifts it could correct itself again. If it did not, the Constitution would have to be amended.

    It sounds hard, I know. But it’s possible that if we started talking more honestly about the most logical, long-term goal, public opinion would begin to shift and the short-term gains would become more, not less likely, as the NRA had to play defense. We might end up with a safer country.

    There are strong arguments against setting a gun-free society as the goal, but there are 100,000 arguments in favor — that’s how many of us get shot every year. Every year 11,000 Americans are murdered. Every year some 20,000 kill themselves with guns.

    Without guns — with only kitchen knives at hand — some of those people would die. Most would still be living.

    Maybe it’s time to start talking about the most logical way to save their lives.

The 'Good Guy With A Gun" Myth

    ast Thursday afternoon in Austin—in the shadow of the clock tower from which a sniper shot four dozen people in 1966—students, faculty and staff gathered to demonstrate their opposition to a newly passed law that will allow the licensed carry of concealed handguns in college classrooms. A smaller group of counter-protesters was there, too, waving signs proclaiming “self defense = human right” and “feeling safe means being armed.” The confrontation was sometimes tense, but not humorless - one topless woman hoisted a sign that read, “These 38s won’t kill students!”

    As the rally ended and the crowds dispersed, students checked their smartphones to see what they had missed on social media. That’s when they learned about the gunman who had shot 16 people in Oregon, killing nine before taking his own life.

    Almost immediately, gun rights advocates pointed to the Umpqua Community College massacre as an illustration of why campus carry is the antidote to school shootings.

    It’s an intuitive and appealing idea—that a good guy with a gun will stop a bad guy with a gun. We can imagine it. We see it in movies. At least 80 million Americans have gone into the gun store, laid money on the counter, and purchased that fantasy. And yet it rarely plays out as envisioned. Is it because there aren’t enough guns? Is it because the guns aren’t allowed where they are needed? Or is there something else wrong with our aspirations to heroism?

    Speaking Friday on CNN Newsroom with Carol Costello, perennial gun rights advocate John Lott said, “My solution for these mass shootings is to look at the fact that every single time, these attacks occur where guns are banned. Every single time.”

    That’s neither true in general nor true in this instance. The FBI tells us that active-shooter scenarios occur in all sorts of environments where guns are allowed—homes, businesses, outdoor spaces. (In fact, there was another mass shooting the same day as the Oregon massacre, leaving three dead and one severely wounded in a home in North Florida.) And Umpqua Community College itself wasn’t a gun-free zone. Oregon is one of seven states that allow guns on college campuses—the consequence of a 2011 court decision that overturned a longstanding ban. In 2012, the state board of education introduced several limitations on campus carry, but those were not widely enforced.

    School policy at UCC does ban students from carrying guns into buildings except as “authorized by law,” but at least one student interpreted his concealed handgun license as legal authorization.

    John Parker Jr., an Umpqua student and Air Force veteran, told multiple media outlets that he was armed and on campus at the time of the attack last week. Parker and other student veterans (perhaps also armed) thought about intervening. “Luckily we made the choice not to get involved,” Parker told MSNBC. “We were quite a distance away from the actual building where it was happening, which could have opened us up to being potential targets ourselves.”

    Parker’s story changed when he spoke to Fox News' Sean Hannity. Instead of saying he “made the choice” not to get involved, Parker said school staff prevented him from helping. Breitbart and other right-wing outlets are making the case that, if only there had been more armed students on campus, one of them might have been able to make a difference. Ideally, there would be so many guns on campus (one in every classroom? one for every student?) that gunmen wouldn’t even attempt a school shooting. Parker is just one of many armed civilians who have been present or proximal to a mass shooting but was unable to stop it. The canard of the armed civilian mass-shooting hero is perpetuated by exaggerations and half-truths. There’s the story of Joel Myrick, an assistant principal who “stopped” a shooting at Pearl High School—but only after it was already over and the shooter was leaving.

    There’s the story of James Strand, the armed banquet-hall proprietor who “stopped” a shooting at a school dance he was hosting—but only after the student gunman had exhausted all of his ammunition.

    There’s Nick Meli, a shopper who drew his weapon in self-defense during an attack at Clackamas Mall - but Meli’s story has changed repeatedly, and local police say that his role in causing the shooter’s suicide is “inconclusive” and “speculation.”

    There’s Mark Kram, who shot a gunman fleeing on a bicycle from the scene of a shooting. Kram also ran down the gunman with a car.

    There’s Joe Zamudio, who came running to help when he heard the gunfire that injured Gabby Giffords and killed six others in Tucson. But by the time Zamudio was on the scene, unarmed civilians had already tackled and disarmed the perpetrator. Zamudio later said that, in his confusion, he was within seconds of shooting the wrong person.

    There’s Joseph Robert Wilcox, who drew his concealed handgun in a Las Vegas Walmart to confront gunmen who had executed police officers nearby. Wilcox was himself killed by one of the two assailants, both of whom then engaged police in a firefight.

    And then there are the fifth wheels—armed civilians who have confronted mass shooters simultaneously with police, such as Allen Crum, who accompanied three law enforcement officers onto the observation deck of the UT Main Building to end the 1966 sniper attack.

    That doesn’t mean there aren’t also instances of legitimate civilian gun use. The NRA points to phone surveys from the 1990s that suggest Americans might use their guns defensively millions of times every year, though even the most charitable efforts to actually document such incidents come up with fewer than 2,000 per year. We’re told that defensive gun use is difficult to document, because guns are such an effective deterrent that—without firing a shot—the mere presence of a weapon can prevent a crime.

    I asked Dr. Peter Langman, a clinical psychologist and author of the book School Shooters: Understanding High School, College, and Adult Perpetrators, whether the presence of guns is a factor rampage shooters consider when they plan their attacks.

    “I don’t think it is. Many of these shooters intend to die, either by their own hand or by suicide by cop. There was an armed guard at Columbine. There were armed campus police at Virginia Tech. The presence of armed security does not seem to be a deterrent,” Langman said. “Because they’re not trying to get away with it. They’re going in essentially on a suicide mission.”

    Langman points out another reason shooters might attack places like schools, theaters and churches. It’s not the absence of guns, but rather the abundance of victims. “If you’re going to do an act like this, you need a certain number of people in one space.”

2-year-old shooter

    A 2-year-old found a revolver in the back seat of a car and shot his grandma in the back—and after years of lobbying against storing guns with safety locks, the NRA is clearly culpable.

    In a week of things that only happen with guns and in America, add yet another to the list.

    In Rock Hill, South Carolina, Americans’ propensity for leaving semi-hidden deadly weaponry around like it’s a Hanukkah present allowed a 2-year-old to grab a .357 revolver and shoot his grandmother in the back. The toddler’s great-aunt was taking him for a ride in her car, and naturally there was a revolver in the back pouch of the seat in front of him, where he could reach it and shoot his grandmother, who was sitting in the passenger seat. “There could be some child neglect or some unlawful conduct towards a child charges based on the age of the child and leaving the gun within reaching distance of a young minor,” said Rock Hill Police Chief Mark Bollinger.

    The operative phrase is “could be.” If the grandmother or great-aunt had put the toddler in the back without a car seat, you can bet your ass there’d be charges. If they’d put a shot of whiskey in front of him, same deal. Or if they hadn’t fed him or left him in a hot car, or perhaps, if he were five years older, just let him walk less than half a mile to a playground.

    But a gun within reach, nah. Not in the America where we’re electing cast members from Buckwild to represent us in Congress. Tea Party ignoramuses think a gun fetish is just a lifestyle choice and National Rifle Association (NRA) bullshit and legalistic bribes are tantamount to Solomonic judgments.

    For here again, as with the campus shootings in Oregon, Texas, and Arizona, or the execution of a reporter on live television in Roanoke, Virginia, the NRA is clearly culpable. It has lobbied against every attempt to require that guns be stored with safety locks and told parents not to use them. It fights against the requirement or even existence on the market of smart gun technology that would allow only the owner of the weapon to use it. It has fought mandated training and the kind of personal liability insurance requirement that tends to make people more careful with their deadly weaponry.

    No, the NRA pushes on kids its inane Eddie the Eagle, a cartoon character who’s supposed to convince children to get an adult when they see a gun. It’s been proven to work about as well as telling Ted Nugent to bathe. There’s a reason these things don’t happen in other high-income countries, nations not saddled with this group of misanthropic, evolutionary-scale losers operating out of the congressional offices of the vast majority of members of one of our two major parties.

    Speaking of this, I have been impressed by President Obama’s reaction to the recent shootings, his righteous anger at those willfully endangering our children. But using everything at your disposal really means using everything at your disposal. So why, then, would his Justice Department award a $2.4 million grant to the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the gun industry’s official lobby, which in a cruel twist of irony is located in Newtown, Connecticut?

    Handing out gun locks and teaching safety is an obvious good. But can’t you find people better to do it than the yahoos who exist near Sandy Hook and still lobbied against every reform that could have saved kids’ lives after a massacre in their own damn town? Is it possible to be more terrible human beings (I use that term loosely)?

    There’s a battle raging. And the NRA is on the wrong side of it, and history as well. It will be demographically extinct within a decade to a decade and a half. But a lot of innocent people can die in that timespan, and it seems determined to make as many as possible pay the price for its ignorance and avarice.

    Kids shooting their family members in cars is patently ridiculous, and preventable. It’s just another symptom of a society sick with the NRA virus. We’ve started to get better, as gun owners increasingly realize the NRA leadership is a bunch of batshit nutters and break away to do their own thing. But clearly it’s no time to let up now.

N.R.A

    In the wake of the massacre at Umpqua Community College, in Oregon, Hillary Clinton promised that if she is elected President she will use executive power to make it harder for people to buy guns without background checks. Meanwhile, Ben Carson, one of the Republican Presidential candidates, said, “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” The two responses could hardly have been more different, but both were testaments to the power of a single organization: the National Rifle Association. Clinton invoked executive action because the N.R.A. has made it unthinkable that a Republican-controlled Congress could pass meaningful gun-control legislation. Carson found it expedient to make his comment because the N.R.A. has shaped the public discourse around guns, in one of the most successful P.R. (or propaganda, depending on your perspective) campaigns of all time.

    In many accounts, the power of the N.R.A. comes down to money. The organization has an annual operating budget of some quarter of a billion dollars, and between 2000 and 2010 it spent fifteen times as much on campaign contributions as gun-control advocates did. But money is less crucial than you’d think. The N.R.A.’s annual lobbying budget is around three million dollars, which is about a fifteenth of what, say, the National Association of Realtors spends. The N.R.A.’s biggest asset isn’t cash but the devotion of its members. Adam Winkler, a law professor at U.C.L.A. and the author of the 2011 book “Gunfight,” told me, “N.R.A. members are politically engaged and politically active. They call and write elected officials, they show up to vote, and they vote based on the gun issue.” In one revealing study, people who were in favor of permits for gun owners described themselves as more invested in the issue than gun-rights supporters did. Yet people in the latter group were four times as likely to have donated money and written a politician about the issue.

    The N.R.A.’s ability to mobilize is a classic example of what the advertising guru David Ogilvy called the power of one “big idea.” Beginning in the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. relentlessly promoted the view that the right to own a gun is sacrosanct. Playing on fear of rising crime rates and distrust of government, it transformed the terms of the debate. As Ladd Everitt, of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, told me, “Gun-control people were rattling off public-health statistics to make their case, while the N.R.A. was connecting gun rights to core American values like individualism and personal liberty.” The success of this strategy explains things that otherwise look anomalous, such as the refusal to be conciliatory even after killings that you’d think would be P.R. disasters. After the massacre of schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, the N.R.A.’s C.E.O. sent a series of e-mails to his members warning them that anti-gun forces were going to use it to “ban your guns” and “destroy the Second Amendment.”

    The idea that gun rights are perpetually under threat has been a staple of the N.R.A.’s message for the past four decades. Yet, for most of that period, the gun-control movement was disorganized and ineffective. Today, the landscape is changing. “Newtown really marked a major turning point in America’s gun debate,” Winkler said. “We’ve seen a completely new, reinvigorated gun-control movement, one that has much more grassroots support, and that’s now being backed by real money.” Michael Bloomberg’s Super PAC, Independence USA, has spent millions backing gun-control candidates, and he’s pledged fifty million dollars to the cause. Campaigners have become more effective in pushing for gun-control measures, particularly at the local and state level: in Washington State last year, a referendum to expand background checks got almost sixty per cent of the vote. There are even signs that the N.R.A.’s ability to make or break politicians could be waning; senators it has given F ratings have been reëlected in purple states. Indeed, Hillary Clinton’s embrace of gun control is telling: previously, Democratic Presidential candidates tended to shy away from the issue.

    These shifts, plus the fact that demographics are not in the N.R.A.’s favor (Latino and urban voters mostly support gun control), might make it seem that the N.R.A.’s dominance is ebbing. But, if so, that has yet to show up in the numbers. A Pew survey last December found that a majority of Americans thought protecting gun rights was more important than gun control. Fifteen years before, the same poll found that sixty-six per cent of Americans thought that gun control mattered more. And last year, despite all the new money and the grassroots campaigns, states passed more laws expanding gun rights than restricting them.

    What is true is that the N.R.A. at last has worthy opponents. The gun-control movement is far more pragmatic than it once was. When the N.R.A. took up the banner of gun rights, in the seventies, gun-control advocates were openly prohibitionist. (The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence was originally called the National Coalition to Ban Handguns.) Today, they’re respectful of gun owners and focussed on screening and background checks. That’s a sensible strategy. It’s also an accommodation to the political reality that the N.R.A. created.

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