An un-biased article covering both sides!
Gun Control Is a Misfire
The most fervent and polarized sides in the renewed debate on gun control share one piece of solid common ground: they both invest rather magical qualities in the cold, lifeless hardware of guns themselves.
For liberals, the very term “gun violence” has been reified into some sort of natural *******, completely detached from any identifiable root causes other than guns themselves—as if .45 semi-automatics, Bushmaster black rifles, and high-capacity magazines exert some hypnotic gravitational pull that beckons latent maniacs to pick them up and spray innocent crowds with military-like barrages.
On the other side, hardcore NRA supporters and certain other Second Amendment support groups define guns and weaponry as not just the symbolic but also the highest material expression of liberty, freedom, and moral rectitude. Anybody who can buy and possess a gun, especially if he or she conceals it—or even open carries—in public, automatically passes into the ranks of being a “good guy.” No matter what this new hero’s background, inclinations, or emotional make-up might be.
Now it seems this sterile debate is destined to become a wedge issue once more. So it was in the early ’90s, thanks to an aggressive push by the NRA. This time around, however, Democrats are flogging the issue and taking the initiative.
It’s a rather radical departure for liberals. Many a Democratic operative was convinced that the Gingrich Congress, with high-caliber NRA funding, swept in as a snapback to the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban championed by California’s Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein and backed by the Clinton White House. And when Al Gore could not carry his own state of Tennessee in 2000—which would have put him over the top regardless of Florida’s Hurricane Chad—those same party insiders were further convinced that gun control was the culprit.
With Democrats and liberals persuaded that the issue had become politically radioactive, they dropped gun control like a red-hot rifle barrel. Indeed,
during the 2008 presidential primary cycle, the Democratic National Committee issued a statement slapping Republican candidate Mitt Romney for having supported gun control while governor of Massachusetts. “Either Mitt Romney’s brand new NRA lifetime membership card wasn’t activated in time to get him into the convention or Romney was afraid he wouldn’t be able to smooth talk his way out of his record on gun issues,” wrote DNC spokesman Damien LaVera.
During his first term in office, the only action that Barack Obama took on the issue was to liberalize the possession of guns in national parks and wildlife refuges. Yet liberals have now done another about-face. At the beginning of this year, on the heels of a high-profile shooting on an Oregon college campus that took nine lives, a teary-eyed president went on national TV to announce some small-scale tweaks in ATF regulations saying, “as I said just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and I said each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough. It’s not enough.”
Denunciations of a rampant “gun violence epidemic” and “mass shootings” have become leading liberal campaign tropes. For Hillary Clinton, her opponent Bernie Sanders’s D-minus rating from the NRA is not good enough.
Mega-billionaire and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has poured millions into gun-control organizations, many of them brandishing filed-down, soft-sounding names like “Everytown Against Gun Violence” and “Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.” The words “gun control” have been replaced with what seem to be focus-group-tested euphemisms like “sensible gun reform,” “common sense gun safety reform,” and now the ubiquitous “opposition to gun violence.”
The web fills up daily with liberal memes about a “Florida man” or some other poor soul shooting himself accidentally or getting shot by his toddler, creating the impression that in this nation of 320 million people such incidents are now as prevalent as the common cold—or at least more common than people showing up in the ER to have sex-related gadgets removed from this or that orifice.
In the aftermath of the San Bernardino shootings late last year, MSNBC’s talking head Rachel Maddow, along with other liberal outlets like Vox, stoked the fires of the renewed and rebranded gun-control movement by quoting a spurious
Washington Post claim that in 2015 America was bloodied by a staggering 355 mass shootings.
No matter that Mark Follman, keeper of a database on shootings in America for the decidedly left-of-center and adamantly anti-NRA
mom Jones, debunked this hysteria in the
New York Times, saying there had been, in fact, only four mass killings in 2015—consistent, more or less, with the tallies of the previous 30 years. “[A]s those numbers gain traction in the news media,” Follmer wrote, referring to the preposterous figure of nearly one mass shooting per day, “they distort our understanding.”
Follman’s quest to remain clear-headed on the matter—instead of joining in the growing demagogy that suggests going to the movies in America today resembles something like being in the infantry defending Fallujah—leaves him in a fairly rarified minority, at least on the liberal left.
The renewed push for more gun control—or against “gun violence” if you prefer—should be fully understandable. The *******-soaked media spectacles of the Gabby Giffords shooting, the massacres in Aurora and Charleston, and the thought of 20 small children and six adults gunned down in Newtown very well should produce an emotional shock and urge “to do something.” For Democrats, however, these incidents urged them to cynically reload the gun-control issue and offer a number of mostly useless proposals that will do nothing to reduce gun murders.
Most of the underpinnings of “gun violence” reforms are based on skewed assumptions, mixed with a sometimes shocking dose of ignorance on the part of policymakers, re-enforced by a media class that cannot often tell one end of a gun from the other. The rhetoric of the movement also continues to stigmatize just about anybody who owns a gun as a knuckle-dragging supporter of fringe militias. Worse, at least from my perspective, the current gun-control strategy also plays directly into the hands of an NRA that is, in fact, more a lobbying group for the gun industry than for gun owners.
Liberals also now recur to the scourge of “gun violence” as a convenient way to betray their own historic commitment to greater social justice. No longer do they need to tackle such daunting issues as urban decay, low wages, and poor education because they prefer to reverse cause and effect: if we could only get rid of guns… It’s become a catchall mantra for the disorder of too many urban centers and the marginalization of their inhabitants, who are the ones doing most of the dying—and most of the killing.
Some personal disclosure is in order. My rap against the majority of gun-control activists does not stem from an absolutist Second Amendment position. I think there are some rational and bold legislative steps that should be enacted to reduce all social violence, including that from a barrel of a gun. Like most rational people, yes, I oppose innocent people dying from gunshots. Politically, I might be defined as a libertarian leftist—definitely a leftist. I am also a gun owner and a member in good standing of the (small) Liberal Gun Club. I own 10 guns, including a legal AK-47, incorrectly vilified as an “assault rifle.” And I reload my own ammo.
I would love to see an honest debate on guns in American life. But I refuse to support what has essentially become one more distracting, off-point skirmish in the culture wars. There is very little seriousness and a whole lot of cultural red meat in the reborn Democratic push against “gun violence.” It is fashioned much more to buck up partisan electoral support in swing suburban districts and among minority voters than to reduce the abuse of guns. To “oppose gun violence” or to argue for “common sense gun safety,” even without knowing anything about the issue, merely imbues rank-and-file liberals with a warm, fuzzy sense of moral superiority.
Likewise, a fiction has been born that all gun owners are an identifiable and unique species dominated by chubby white men enthralled by Rush Limbaugh, militias, and a desire to shoot it out with jackbooted Feds. Gun owners in reality defy pigeonholing as “gun nuts” or “gunners,” and whenever I go target shooting at my local Los Angeles range I find a crowd who by age, race, and apparent social background are wildly more diverse than the University of Southern California journalism school faculty from which I recently retired.
On a very personal basis, I will confess, I am now tired of and deeply annoyed by affluent liberals—living in 6,000-square-foot houses with heated swimming pools, who use a 400-horsepower SUV to drive their ******* two blocks to school, with a family carbon footprint that of a small battleship—asking me sharply, “So why do you need so many guns?” or “Why on earth do you need such a powerful rifle?”
Getting to a rational position on guns and gun control, however, now requires conjoining a number of hard facts and shooting down a bevy of shibboleths kept alive and energized by liberal ignorance. It requires anything but an emotion-driven lashing out at strawmen.
Thanks to pernicious legislation sponsored by the NRA, firearms research in the United States is full of roadblocks. So nobody really knows how many guns there are in America. A 2012 Congressional Research Service report estimated that in 2009 there were 310 million firearms: “114 million handguns, 110 million rifles, and 86 million shotguns.” Other more recent estimates put the figure between 245 million or 360 million.
The precise figure means little. One way or another there is “easy access” to guns. And as firearms tend to survive and function for many, many decades, there can be absolutely no discussion of gun control without accepting this simple, cold reality.
I am not interested in any discussion of what the Second Amendment really means, nor am I much interested in any moral discourse either way on guns. I am not, simply, because the horse left the barn a very long time ago and those guns are here to stay. No buyback program, no further restriction laws, no weapons bans are going to make any visible difference. Any control measure that does not start from this reality is about as realistic as signing a petition against earthquakes.
The only concrete achievement of the gun-control movement has been to generate an ever-increasing amount of gun sales. And many advocates are not honest in declaring their underlying motivation.
Gun-control activists need not take my word for it that their strategy has been a rank failure. In 2015, the FBI processed a record number of firearms background checks: more than 23 million requests were handled by the National Instant Background Check System. Again, there is no certainty, but it is estimated that only 1 percent or maybe 2 percent of those checks come back negative, meaning that at least 20 million new guns were put into circulation just last year.
This trend has been building historically. If the goal of gun-control advocates has been to reduce what’s called easy access to guns, they have totally failed—if not been running the wrong way down the field.
Yes, the NRA’s constant drumbeating about “gun grabbers” and real or imagined fears about terrorist attacks help fuel the binge buying. Yet while the NRA clearly exaggerates the threat of gun confiscation, control advocates lay the groundwork by focusing their efforts far too much on the gear—the guns—instead of the people who use them.
Further, count me among those who suspect the real motives of many of those who try to soft-sell control with the new euphemisms of “gun safety reform” and “sensible gun reform.” There is no way to substantiate my guess scientifically, but having spent my adult life in a primarily “progressive” and “liberal” milieu it is rather obvious to me that many, if not most, urban middle-class liberals who do not own guns actually hate guns. That is their understandable right. But just underneath their mumbo-jumbo rhetoric about “gun safety” lurks a desire to somehow magically do away with, ban, or confiscate guns and repeal the Second Amendment.
Look no further than Hillary Clinton’s campaign slam on Bernie Sanders for having voted for the 2005 law that granted gun manufacturers heavy layers of protection against legal liability claims. Said Clinton recently: “So far as I know, the gun industry and gun sellers are the only business in America that is totally free of liability for their behavior. Nobody else is given that immunity. And that just illustrates the extremism that has taken over this debate.”
As NPR Fact Check pointed out, that’s not 100 percent true. Clinton’s statement “doesn’t appear to be completely accurate,” Adam Winkler, professor of law at UCLA and author of
Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, told NPR. “The 2005 law does not prevent gun makers from being held liable for defects in their design. Like car makers, gun makers can be sued for selling a defective product. The problem is that gun violence victims often want to hold gun makers liable for the criminal misuse of a properly functioning product.”
If Clinton’s stated desire to overturn that law were fulfilled, it would obviously mean that gun makers could be sued for engaging in truth-in-advertising, i.e., for selling ostensibly lethal weapons that actually are lethal. In what sort of logic is that not advocating the shutdown of the industry? (Sanders, by the way, under pressure from Clinton’s attacks and much of his own progressive base, reversed his position before the Iowa caucuses and is now supporting a bill that would weaken that immunity.)
Gun homicides are on a historic decline and are not a growing epidemic.
The round-the-clock coverage given to the handful of outright gun massacres by tabloid outlets like CNN creates the sensation that firearms homicides are a rapidly multiplying American epidemic. The reality is quite different, if not the opposite.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, gun deaths have been in general decline for more than 20 years, down some 31 percent since 1993. Between 1993 and 2000 the tally was down a full 50 percent, even as gun sales increased. Since 2000 the gun ******* rate has more or less stabilized, showing only marginal variation up or down year to year.
About 11,000 Americans every year are shot to death when someone else pulls the trigger. Twice that number commit suicide by gun. Let’s repeat that fact: two-thirds of American gun violence is deliberately self-inflicted, and while certainly lamentable represents no public safety threat—unless you are among those committing suicide.
Gun suicides since 2010, in fact, have ticked slightly upward. Would any gun control measure slow down the suicide rate? I have no idea, nor does anybody else. I would have to assume not, just as prohibiting alcohol did nothing to diminish alcoholism. (But it sure did fuel armed gang warfare by bootleggers.)
The Pew study also found, to nobody’s surprise, that in spite of the falloff in gun deaths, a full 56 percent of Americans thought that gun-related killings had actually increased over the last 20 years.
As to “gun safety”—the new catchword for gun control—the grand total of accidental gun deaths in the U.S. hovers at about 500 per year. Even strict gun-control advocates put the number no higher than 600.
It’s never comfortable playing the atrocity game of comparing death tolls, but it’s necessary when fashioning public-policy priorities: notably, the CDC calculates that 75,000 Americans die each year of HA-I, or Healthcare Associated Infections, a fancy term for the deaths of otherwise nonterminal patient caused by lethal bacteria in hospitals. Perhaps a campaign advocating “Health Care Safety Reform” is in order?
Mass killings are not the biggest gun problem we face. And gun death is not an equal-opportunity offender.
The single greatest inconvenient truth in the totality of the gun issue is that mass killings of the sort carried out in Roseburg, Oregon or Newtown, Connecticut are absolute outliers. These sorts of atrocities account for far less than 1 percent of American gun deaths. And a majority of these killings employed legally purchased weapons.
These are also acts carried out by clearly mentally ill subjects. Is it cruel, insensitive, or cynical to say that probably nothing could prevent such massacres? No. Even in highly authoritarian states like China, where civilian ownership of guns is strictly forbidden and the citizenry is tightly monitored, crazed individuals, given enough will, can spread bloody mayhem, in some incidents using knives to ******* five or 10 times the number of victims in the worst American mass shootings.
And to obsess over high-profile campus killings, while pretty much ignoring the daily meat-grinder ******* toll in urban hot spots like Chicago or Detroit, takes our eyes off the bigger problem. Writes African-American columnist Jamelle Bouie:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/gun-control-is-a-misfire/
I myself own over 30 guns and am not supporting any type of gun control......well except on the assault rifle......I am against the NRA and it's greedy fear mongering...just to push sales