“In What Kind Of Society Do We Live?: Pediatricians Take On The NRA Over Gun Safety
For the past three decades, the American Academy of Pediatrics—some 62,000 members strong—has been an outspoken voice on the issue of gun control, a position that has landed it on the NRA’s (admittedly very long) list of enemies. In 1992, the AAP issued its first policy statement supporting a handgun and assault weapons ban, making it the first public health organization to do so, and it has long recommended that doctors talk about gun safety with parents. Since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, the AAP has stepped up attempts to educate parents about gun safety around children.
But as the fight over gun rights grows ever more virulent at the national level, the AAP and individual doctors have quietly begun to take a softer stance on the issue, turning their focus to peddling realistic policies rather than clinging to a hard-and-fast no-guns line.
On a recent Sunday in April, 70 doctors and scientists associated with the AAP filed into a convention center in Vancouver to discuss firearm injury prevention. Presenters clicked through PowerPoint slides highlighting topics such as risk factors for gun injuries, popular gun-safety myths, and stats on suicide and homicide due to guns in the home. “The issue of guns really follows directly from all the concerns we have about injuries in general. This is one kind of injury that endangers the health and life of kids,” said Dr. Robert Sege, a Boston Medical Center pediatrician, who gave a presentation on how to talk about guns with parents.
The AAP’s outgoing president, Thomas McInerny—who made the Sandy Hook massacre a call to action for gun safety during his one-year post—sat in the audience. While the AAP has been advocating for an end to gun violence for some 30 years now, the shooting in Newtown shocked the nation and galvanized the AAP’s doctors to redouble their efforts in support of new gun-control measures. Newtown pediatrician Laura Nowacki lost eight of her patients in the massacre at Sandy Hook. “I’ve never spoken to the media until all of this happened. But I really believe I have to stand up. I have to use my voice,” she told the AAP News in June.
Several more Newtown victims were patients of Dr. Richard Auerbach; he’d held two of them in his arms in the delivery room where they were born. Auerbach, along with other pediatricians, wrote to Congress last year in support of an ultimately doomed measure to ban semiautomatic assault weapons brought by Senator Diane Feinstein, a California Democrat.
“These guns, these bullets blew open these children’s heads, their bodies, their limbs,” Auerbach wrote. “In what kind of society do we live, whereby these weapons are needed to defend and protect?”
For its part, the National Rifle Association (NRA) says pediatricians have no business talking about gun laws. “The AAP has a long history of advocating for gun control measures that a majority of the American people have rejected time and time again,” says NRA spokesperson Catherine Mortensen, citing in particular the Eddie Eagle GunSafe Program, which it says has been used to teach gun safety to over 27 million children since 1988.
“The fact is, no one does more to promote gun safety, education, and training than the National Rifle Association,” Mortensen says. “And if these pediatricians want to help us promote that message, we would welcome their membership in the NRA. Dues are 25 dollars a year.”
An estimated 20,600 people under the age of 25 are injured by a gun every year and 6,570 die, according to the AAP. Guns kill twice as many in this age group as cancer, five times as many as heart disease and 20 times as many as infections. By 2015, guns are expected to surpass motor vehicle crashes as a cause of death for young people, according to the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.
In the year after Newtown, six states—California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey and New York—passed comprehensive gun safety laws. Gun rights groups immediately mounted challenges and have countered by lobbying for and passing legal expansions of gun rights. Most recently in Georgia, the governor signed what detractors call the “Guns Everywhere” Act allowing licensed gun owners to carry their weapons in public places, including schools, churches and bars. The NRA called its passage a “historic victory for the Second Amendment.”
In the last year and a half, states have been duking it out in a sort of tit-for-tat legislative pattern—the number of state laws strengthening firearm regulations (64) is close to the number weakening them, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, an advocacy group that tracks state gun laws. The largest gun-rights expansion efforts were concentrated in the South, while the coasts passed stronger gun control laws.
Meanwhile, even as fewer Americans choose to own guns—the share of households with a gun has dropped to about a third down from half in the 1980s, according to the Pew Research Center—public support for the regulation of firearms also seems to be down. In the 1990s, support for stricter gun laws hovered between 60 and 78 percent. More recent polling shows fewer than half of Americans think gun laws should be more strict, down from 58 percent from a survey given just after the Newtown shooting.
Because of this public reluctance, the AAP has started to focus on how to realistically reach parents in red states as well as blue—and to soften some of its language on gun control. The most recent policy statement affirms that “the most effective measure to prevent suicide, homicide, and unintentional firearm-related injuries to children and adolescents is the absence of guns from homes and communities,” but no longer calls for a total ban on handguns, instead advocating for “the strongest possible regulations” for their use.
Likewise, pediatricians and gun control advocates have tempered their message—and they say the less controversial efforts are working.
For pediatrician Claudia Fruin, telling parents not to keep a gun in their home is unrealistic, especially in Utah where she practices and is part of the AAP leadership. The conservative state was named the fourth-best for gun owners by Guns and Ammo magazine last year partly due to laws allowing firearms on school grounds.
“There needs to be a compromise. Otherwise we’re isolating people and they’re just pissed off at us,” Fruin says. In January she founded Bulletproof Kids, a public service campaign that advocates for the secure storage of firearms. The group—whose motto, “Owning a gun is a right. Protecting children is a responsibility” was created to be distinctively Second Amendment-friendly—partners the Utah chapter of AAP with law enforcement and businesses including gun shops like Doug’s Shoot’n Sports and “Get Some” Guns and Ammo as well as Liberty Safe, a safe manufacturer, on the safe storage of guns in the home, an issue Fruin says is “hopefully the one thing we can all agree on.”
Fruin says although she was unable to secure a partnership with the Shooting Sports Council (the Utah equivalent of the NRA accuses her of having a political agenda), most parents have been receptive, wanting to know how they can get their hands on a biometric safe. And other states have reached out to Fruin for advice on replicating the program.
In West Virginia, where pediatric resident Lisa Costello notes that one out of every two homes has a gun, similar local efforts are underway to promote firearm safety from the pediatrician’s office.
Costello is one of the chairs for the P.A.V.E. campaign (Pediatricians Against Violence Everywhere), a one-year advocacy effort focusing on firearm injury prevention by the special arm of AAP for pediatricians-in-training.
The operation encourages the 13,000-member group to mobilize on gun safety at the clinic, the community, and the state and federal level, as well as on social media.
“I see this in my clinic, we see this in our emergency rooms, in our inpatient wards, in our ICUS. We see these children and families impacted by firearms. That’s why we’ve been motivated to focus on this issue,” says Costello, who for her part counsels parents on firearms and injury prevention.
“My parents are very receptive to the issue of firearm injury. They appreciate that as a pediatrician I’m concerned for my patients’ health and safety,” Costello says.
Most recently, the NRA and the AAP have been embroiled in a very public legal feud over the rights of doctors to talk with parents about gun safety. In 2011, Florida Governor Rick Scott signed a NRA-sponsored law that forbade pediatricians from asking about guns in the home. A federal judge later struck down the law as unconstitutional and a decision on the state’s appeal is pending. The NRA has sponsored similar legislation in at least five other states—Alabama, North Carolina, West Virginia, Minnesota, and Oklahoma.
AAP guidelines urge pediatricians to counsel parents during checkups about the dangers of allowing kids to have access to guns. About half of all AAP pediatricians say they recommend the removal of handguns from the home, according to a national survey of AAP members.
There’s also the issue of funding for federal research—of which there has been almost none. Even after President Obama lifted the long freeze on gun research—lobbied for and won by the NRA in 1996—Congress still has yet to appropriate the $10 million in funds promised to the CDC for gun research, an amount that even if released would be too little for quality research, according to pediatricians I spoke with. But the amount isn’t likely to matter. As a researcher who spend over $1 million funding his own work put it, “Hell will freeze over before this Congress gives them [the CDC] money.” Moreover, the long moratorium has resulted in a paucity of qualified experts to research firearm injuries.
Despite the challenges, or motivated by them, pediatricians say they’ll continue to push for more research and a change in policy that will make children safer. As for the opposition, doctors insist the tide is turning.
“The NRA’s influence has peaked. Surveys of NRA members show that they’re a little tired of their leadership,” pediatrician and AAP meeting presenter Dr. Sege says. “And in general, pediatricians are never really that far ahead of American families. There are 60,000 of us and we see almost every American child almost every year. If the pediatricians are strong on this issue, it’s hard for me to believe that there will be such a discrepancy over what we believe and what the families we care for believe.”
By: Brandy Zadrozny, The Daily Beast, May 15, 2014
“NRA Finally Meets Its Match”: Why Richard Martinez Should Have Them Shaking
Richard Martinez’s son Christopher was among the six college students murdered this weekend in Isla Vista, California. It’s impossible to fathom the grief that Martinez must be experiencing right now, and the simple fact that he is upright and mobile is an act of tremendous courage. Which is precisely what makes everything else that he has done in the days since he lost his son all the more astounding.
From his first public statement — a blistering and emotional indictment of “craven” politicians who refuse to act on even moderate gun reform — to the tribute to Christopher he delivered Tuesday before a crowd of thousands, Martinez has been willing to show his raw and devastating grief to the world. He has made himself the gnarled and anguished face of our broken system — the lives that it takes and the lives that it ruins. His vulnerability and righteous, focused anger is unlike anything we’ve seen in response to a mass shooting.
And it should scare the shit out of the National Rifle Association, the gun lobby and the cowardly politicians who use these deadly weapons as literal and figurative political props.
It isn’t just the force of Martinez’s emotions or political conviction that make him powerful. He is currently shouldering the unimaginable grief of being yet another parent who has lost yet another child in yet another mass shooting. He has seen this happen before, he knows the political script that’s already playing out. He has listened as gun apologists — time and again — urge the nation not to “politicize” a national tragedy out of respect for the families, and then watched them turn on these same families in order to protect our deadly — and immensely profitable — culture of guns. And he’s using it. All of it.
Days after 26 people were murdered in Newtown, Connecticut, Wayne LaPierre denounced gun reform advocates for “exploit[ing] the tragedy for political gain.” Months later, Sarah Palin echoed the sentiment. ”Leaders are in it for themselves, not for the American people,” she told a crowd that summer, before effectively declaring how proud she was that her son Trig would grow up in a country where men like Elliot Rodger and Adam Lanza can buy guns and hoard ammunition without authorities batting an eyelash.
Martinez may be the single most powerful force we have against this kind of slithering political cowardice. He’s already familiar with the political dirty tricks and knows where the conversation will eventually turn — that the pro-gun crowd is going to come out hard against him, just as they have turned on other parents and survivors. “Right now, there hasn’t been much blowback from the other side,” Martinez noted during a Tuesday interview with MSNBC. “But I anticipate that once my grieving period is over, the gloves will come off. I don’t think it’s going to be easy. They are going to try to do to me the same thing that they’ve done to all of these people. But I have a message for them: My son is dead. There is nothing you could do to me that is worse than that.”
I can’t imagine a more direct rebuttal to the LaPierres and the Palins in this country. To the ridiculous rifle-holding Mitch McConnells and every other ludicrous coward currently walking the halls of Congress and state legislatures across the country. These are the people who — as Martinez has made explicit — are responsible for these terribly predictable and preventable tragedies. Because they have the power to implement sensible reform, but instead stand by and do nothing while more people die every single day.
Martinez also knows that while it’s the public’s job to hold our leadership’s feet to the fire, he’s not the one responsible for having all the answers. “Where’s the leadership on this? We elect these people and we give them power, and it’s just outrageous,” he said during the same interview. “My son just died a few days ago, and you expect me to have the answers to these questions? There are people out there who have the answers. Why isn’t our leadership rounding these people up?”
But Martinez’s grasp of the issue puts most of our elected officials to shame. “When you asked me about solutions, here’s what I’ve learned,” he explained. “This is a complicated issue, but there’s a certain commonality between these events. Typically, all of these incidents involved […] mental health issues, gun violence and violence against women. These three problems are almost always combined.”
Like other parents whose lives have been upturned by gun violence — women like Lucia McBath, the mother of Jordan Davis, and Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin — Martinez recognizes and is naming the pattern of violence in the most public way imaginable. But while Congress has so far been wildly successful at shutting down gun reform efforts, parents like Martinez, McBath and Fulton — who are electrifying the national conversation and building solidarity among other families forever changed by rampant access to deadly weapons — may be impossible for them to ignore. They are the most powerful messengers we could ask for.
Martinez is brave, destroyed, weeping, loud, furious and unpredictable in his grief. He is channeling all of that with a singular focus: Change. Or as he said that first day, introducing himself to the world as the grieving but determined father of Christopher Michaels-Martinez: “Not one more.”
“For me to live with this and honor his memory, I will continue to go anywhere and talk to anybody for as long as they want and are willing to listen to me about this problem. I’m not going to shut up,” he said Tuesday. He really seems to mean it.
By: Katie McDonough, Assistant Editor, Salon, May 29, 2014
“Conservative Intellectual Bankruptcy”: Where The Right’s Gun Logic Falls Apart
The “Obama administration” and “gun registry.” Put those words together in a sentence and its guaranteed to trigger conservative apoplexy. But now the Obama administration really is about to start cataloging guns, and it’s eliciting little more than approving head nods from the right. How can that be? Here’s how.
For as long as anyone can remember, the right’s fought tooth and nail against any effort to limit access to just about any kind of firearm. Handgun, AK-47, bazooka — if it fires something at killing speed, you should be able to have it.
And for just about the same timeframe, they’ve fought just as hard to prevent the federal government from trying to keep track of who owns weapons in the United States. Their position (boiled down): Everyone should have guns, and no one should know who has guns. Suggest even the most incremental steps towards regulating gun possession and, to hear the right tell it, it’s as if the redcoats are back on the march in Lexington and Concord. A more fundamental threat to our liberties can hardly be imagined.
Now the Department of Justice has announced that it’s going to catalog how many guns the federal government has in its possession and, one imagines, exactly who has them. Red alert! DEFCON 5! (Or 1, whichever is worse!) It’s a gun registry! Confiscation is right around the corner! All is lost! Right? Right?
Actually, if I’m reading my right-wing websites correctly, apparently not. In fact, they seem to think it’s a move that’s long overdue.
How, you may ask, can this be? If knowing who has guns is a bad thing, how can we be OK with the government finding out more about who has guns? Let’s think this through.
What would be the purpose of finding out more about who in the general population owns guns? To help us have a greater understanding of gun violence, and to solve gun crimes when they happen. Why do people on the right oppose a gun registry? Because they see a greater threat in the possibility that the federal government will try to restrict their use of guns or even take them away.
Now, let’s turn the analysis around. What’s the purpose of drilling down on the amount of guns in the federal government? Maybe it has to do with something as mundane as budgeting. Or perhaps its part of an effort to ensure that we are narrowly tailoring the distribution of firearms across the federal bureaucracy to those who actually need them.
If that’s the reason, the hard right should be going nuts. Why? Because it opens the door to the notion that there ought to be an analytical screen between guns and those who seek to carry them, and that there are good reasons to restrict access to guns even among law abiding, mentally competent people. Acknowledging the utility of doing that on the federal level makes it harder to argue against doing it elsewhere.
But the right doesn’t oppose. They support. And again, it has to do with their perception of threat. In this case, it’s apparently the idea that the federal government might be arming itself as part of a plan to subject the general population to the tyranny of the state. Yup. That’s what they’re afraid of.
Now, if you can get past the silliness of that notion, you might say a federal government that has the United States Army at its disposal (to say nothing of the other branches of the military) doesn’t much need to arm anyone else to take over just about anything. And if the federal government is preparing to crack down on average citizens, you might think that tanks, attack helicopters and bunker busting bombs would do the trick. But to admit that would also be admitting that arming citizens really isn’t a hedge against tyranny at all. And of course, it isn’t. But that kind of thinking — call it “logic” — doesn’t feature prominently in the right’s postulations about these kinds of things.
It would be easy to dismiss the right’s ideas about things like this if they weren’t having such an impact on public policy. The people who think the government is on the verge of tyranny are, not infrequently, the same people driving a much larger agenda in the GOP. You can see the push to mainstream their far out ideas everywhere from health care to the environment to tax policy to, yes, guns. And it means that we are increasingly memorializing into law policies that reflect a fantasyland view of America rather than the America most of us live in. That’s not good.
So I say: Bring on the gun count! If for no other reason than this seems to be one of those cases where one brand of right-wing nuttiness (Government tyranny!) is running headlong into another (Bazookas for all!). And if that helps put the brakes on either, then we’ll all be better off.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World Report, May 29, 2014
“Another Idiot With A Gun”: A Sign Of How Out-Of-Control The Gun-Owning Fetish Has Become
One of the many problems with the growing normalization of gun ownership is that a growing number of idiots will want to buy and keep guns for no particularly good reason, and a subset of those idiots will go on to kill people.
Witness the latest horror story, in which an 11-year-old New Jersey boy, Hunter Pederson, was shot dead by his uncle, Chad Olm.
Mr. Olm said Hunter and Mr. Olm’s son asked to see his collection of firearms. So he obligingly whipped out three guns, including a Glock 27 .40-caliber pistol with a laser sight. (Why Mr. Olm felt he needed such a weapon, or such an attachment, has not been explained, probably because there is no satisfying answer.)
After showing his 11-year-old nephew a deadly weapon with a laser sight, he turned on the sight, putting a red dot on the boy’s forehead. For laughs, or something. Mr. Olm said Hunter reached for the gun, and it went off, hitting him above the eye.
Mr. Olm said he keeps his guns unloaded (obviously not), but that he had not checked to make sure before he aimed one at a small boy’s head.
Mr. Olm was arrested and is facing charges of criminal homicide, recklessly endangering another person, and endangering the welfare of children.
Anyone with the slightest shred of sense knows that you check weapons for chambered rounds before you put them away — not when you’re showing them off — and that you should never point a gun at anyone unless you think you might need to shoot.
(My wife comes from a gun-owning family. When she was growing up her father would become enraged if any of his kids pointed so much as a plastic toy pistol at someone.)
Before the comments start piling up from the anti-gun control crowd, I am not saying that all guns should be outlawed or that a better background-check system would necessarily have prevented this senseless death.
But the killing of Hunter is a sign of how out-of-control the gun-owning fetish has become, and how little it has to do with anything the writers of the Constitution envisioned.
By: Andrew Rosenthal, Opinion Pages, The New York Times, May 6, 2014
“Speaking Volumes About The GOP”: Does John McCain Care More About Deaths in Syria Than Gun Violence in America?
Please read these two statistics and notice your emotional reaction to them. Do they make you angry? Do they make you eager for government action? When you digest these roughly equivalent numbers, do they stir you equally?
- A Human Rights groups says more than 150,000 civilians, rebels, and members of the Syrian military have been killed in the nation’s three-year conflict.
- A U.S. gun-control group says more than 100,000 Americans are shot every year in murders, assaults, suicides, and suicide attempts and accidents.
For Sen. John McCain, the hawkish Republican senator from Arizona, the first number makes him spitting mad, literally—as judged Wednesday from my front-row seat at the Harvard Institute of Politics forum, where he answered questions from a moderator and students.
“The Syrian decision has reverberated around the globe,” McCain said, linking President Obama’s blurred red line over Syria to aggressiveness from Russia, China, and Iran. He dismissed suggestions that Americans are war-weary—noting that Ronald Reagan grew the U.S. military in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War—and harshly criticized Obama for dithering on calls to arm Syrian rebels.
Visions of the dead and dying, women and children, lined in the streets after chemical attacks, keep him awake at night, McCain said.
“I am emotional,” declared the infamously temperamental senator, his face reddening with anger. “I’m guilty. I’m emotional.”
Contrast that reaction to the one a few minutes later when a Harvard student pressed McCain on gun control. With a shrug of his shoulders, the two-time presidential candidate noted that he had supported a bill that would have required background checks on all commercial sales of guns. It failed in the Senate.
His tone, passionate and aggressive on Syria, turned professorial and passive-aggressive on guns, as McCain explained that while the U.S. Constitution protects the right to bear arms, gun violence is “an emotional issue.” Congress needs to grapple with the issue somehow, he said, noticeably uncomfortable with his wishy-washiness.
“I know that’s not a good answer,” McCain said, “I wrestle with it all the time.”
So this is how McCain reacts to those two sets of numbers: Go to war for Syrians. Wrestle for America.
Disclosure: I briefly considered working for McCain in 2007, and respect his service to the nation as well as his willingness to compromise with Democrats. On the other hand, I opposed intervention in Syria, support gun regulations, and object to the policies and tactics of the NRA.
And so as McCain hemmed and hawed on gun violence, I turned to the person sitting next to me, Rep. Joe Kennedy, D-Mass., and whispered, “Where’s the emotion he showed on Syria?” Kennedy nodded.
The contrast of emotion may speak as much about the Republican Party as it does about McCain. The GOP is lurching so far to the right that this Arizona conservative is considered a “RINO,” a Republican in Name Only, and there is no room for commonsense policies that uphold the Second Amendment while curbing gun violence.
After supporting one war fought on false pretenses in Iraq, McCain is still rattling U.S. sabers over the deaths of 150,000 Syrians in three years. Normally, that would hardly be notable: McCain, after all, is a consistent interventionist. But laid against the shootings of 100,000 Americans annually, McCain’s peculiar lack of emotion about gun violence seemed to speak to the sorry state of U.S. politics. And made me sad.
By: Ron Fournier, The National Journal, April 28, 2014
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