“Our Blind Spot About Guns”: Politicians Should Be As Rational About Guns As They Are About Motor Vehicles
If we had the same auto fatality rate today that we had in 1921, by my calculations we would have 715,000 Americans dying annually in vehicle accidents.
Instead, we’ve reduced the fatality rate by more than 95 percent — not by confiscating cars, but by regulating them and their drivers sensibly.
We could have said, “Cars don’t kill people. People kill people,” and there would have been an element of truth to that. Many accidents are a result of alcohol consumption, speeding, road rage or driver distraction. Or we could have said, “It’s pointless because even if you regulate cars, then people will just run each other down with bicycles,” and that, too, would have been partly true.
Yet, instead, we built a system that protects us from ourselves. This saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year and is a model of what we should do with guns in America.
Whenever I write about the need for sensible regulation of guns, some readers jeer: Cars kill people, too, so why not ban cars? Why are you so hypocritical as to try to take away guns from law-abiding people when you don’t seize cars?
That question is a reflection of our national blind spot about guns. The truth is that we regulate cars quite intelligently, instituting evidence-based measures to reduce fatalities. Yet the gun lobby is too strong, or our politicians too craven, to do the same for guns. So guns and cars now each kill more than 30,000 in America every year.
One constraint, the argument goes, is the Second Amendment. Yet the paradox is that a bit more than a century ago, there was no universally recognized individual right to bear arms in the United States, but there was widely believed to be a “right to travel” that allowed people to drive cars without regulation.
A court struck down an early attempt to require driver’s licenses, and initial attempts to set speed limits or register vehicles were met with resistance and ridicule. When authorities in New York City sought in 1899 to ban horseless carriages in the parks, the idea was lambasted in The New York Times as “devoid of merit” and “impossible to maintain.”
Yet, over time, it became increasingly obvious that cars were killing and maiming people, as well as scaring horses and causing accidents. As a distinguished former congressman, Robert Cousins, put it in 1910: “Pedestrians are menaced every minute of the days and nights by a wanton recklessness of speed, crippling and killing people at a rate that is appalling.”
Courts and editorial writers alike saw the carnage and agreed that something must be done. By the 1920s, courts routinely accepted driver’s license requirements, car registration and other safety measures.
That continued in recent decades with requirements of seatbelts and air bags, padded dashboards and better bumpers. We cracked down on drunken drivers and instituted graduated licensing for young people, while also improving road engineering to reduce accidents. The upshot is that there is now just over 1 car fatality per 100 million miles driven.
Yet as we’ve learned to treat cars intelligently, we’ve gone in the opposite direction with guns. In his terrific new book, “The Second Amendment: A Biography,” Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, notes that “gun control laws were ubiquitous” in the 19th century. Visitors to Wichita, Kan., for example, were required to check their revolvers at police headquarters.
And Dodge City, symbol of the Wild West? A photo shows a sign on the main street in 1879 warning: “The Carrying of Fire Arms Strictly Prohibited.”
The National Rifle Association supported reasonable gun control for most of its history and didn’t even oppose the landmark Gun Control Act of 1968. But, since then, most attempts at safety regulation have stalled or gone backward, and that makes the example of cars instructive.
“We didn’t ban cars, or send black helicopters to confiscate them,” notes Waldman. “We made cars safer: air bags, seatbelts, increasing the drinking age, lowering the speed limit. There are similar technological and behavioral fixes that can ease the toll of gun violence, from expanded background checks to trigger locks to smart guns that recognize a thumbprint, just like my iPhone does.”
Some of these should be doable. A Quinnipiac poll this month found 92 percent support for background checks for all gun buyers.
These steps won’t eliminate gun deaths any more than seatbelts eliminate auto deaths. But if a combination of measures could reduce the toll by one-third, that would be 10,000 lives saved every year.
A century ago, we reacted to deaths and injuries from unregulated vehicles by imposing sensible safety measures that have saved hundreds of thousands of lives a year. Why can’t we ask politicians to be just as rational about guns?
By: Nicholas Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 1, 2014
“Enough Slaughter”: When Carnage Becomes Routine, We Lose More Than Lives
I am running out of words.
Some crackpot who couldn’t get a date stabs and shoots his way across the Southern California college town of Isla Vista, killing six people and wounding 13 before apparently turning his gun on himself. This happened Friday night. And what shall I say about that?
I mean, I know how this goes. We all do. Weren’t you sort of expecting it when the father of one of the Isla Vista victims blamed his son’s death on the NRA? Would you really be stunned if the NRA countered that none of this would have happened had there been more guns in Isla Vista? And now, this is the part where I am supposed to offer context, to mourn these losses and use them in an argument for sensible gun laws.
We’ve seen it all before, in Newtown, in Tucson, at Virginia Tech, at the Navy Yard in Washington, at that movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. We’ve seen it so much that there is by now a rote sense to it, a sense of going through motions and checking off boxes, of flinging words against indifferent walls with no real expectation the words will change anything — or even be heard.
So I am running out of words. Or maybe just faith in words.
Which ones shall I use? “Sickening?” “Obscene?” “Grotesque?” “Tragic?” You’ve read them all a hundred times. Do they still have power to punch your gut? And what argument shall I use those words to make? Shall I observe that a gun is a weapon of mass destruction and that mentally impaired people should not have access to them? Shall I point out that as a statistical matter, a gun in the home is far more likely to hurt someone you love than to scare off a burglar? Shall I demand we hold our leaders accountable for failing to pass some kind of sensible laws to rein this madness in?
And if I do, do you suppose it will make any difference?
It is a measure of a uniquely American insanity that truths so obvious and inarguable are regarded as controversial and seditious by many people in this country. Indeed, Georgia recently enacted a law allowing guns in churches, school zones, bars, government buildings, even parts of airports. You think those words and that argument will find any purchase there? Don’t hold your breath.
This is why I am running out of words, or faith in words. Too much blood, pain and death. And the dictionary is finite.
I’ll tell you something, though. I grew up in South Los Angeles and lived there at the height of the drug wars of the 1980s. Seemed there was a mass shooting every weekend. They became so routine it seemed like the local paper pretty much stopped paying attention. You’d see a write-up on the back page of the metro section — six dead, three wounded — and that would be it. They reported it like the stats of some out-of-town ball team. Our deaths were routine.
But when carnage becomes routine, we lose more than lives. We lose some essential element of our very humanity. Seven people died in Isla Vista. Then, on Sunday night, a 14-year-old Miami boy argued with his 16-year-old brother over clothing, shot him to death, then killed himself. That same weekend in Detroit, a mentally ill teenager was arrested in the shooting death of his mother’s fiancé. And in Chicago, eight people were shot, one killed, in less than eight hours beginning Monday afternoon.
So I guess I cannot afford to run out of words — or faith. None of us can. Running out of words is an act of surrender, an obeisance to the obscene. Running out of words is running out of outrage. Both those who died and those of us left behind deserve better than that. Our humanity deserves better than that. Here, then, is one final word flung against that high and indifferent wall:
Enough, you hear me?
Enough.
Enough.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National memo, May 28, 2014
“The Sanest Approach To Gun Policy”: The NRA Won’t Like This Idea
The National Rifle Association has just finished its annual meeting in Indianapolis. I don’t think I’m being reductionist in describing the NRA’s position on gun safety as pretty basic: Guns are good; gun regulations are bad. That’s unfortunate because the key insight in the perpetually fruitless gun control debate is that our social problem is deaths from guns, not the guns from themselves.
That distinction opens up the door to what I’ve always believed is the sanest approach to gun policy: a public health approach. What if we treated guns like cars, cribs and small electrical appliances? What if we focused less on the guns and more on when, where and why people get hurt or killed by them?
Automobile safety is an encouraging example. America’s roads are much, much safer than they were a half century ago. We didn’t become anti-car. We didn’t take cars away (except for some chronic drunk drivers). We made cars and roads safer and minimized the situations in which Americans were most likely to kill themselves on the road.
In 2010, the last year for which we have data, roughly 11,000 Americans died in gun homicides; 19,000 died by gun suicide; and 600 died from gun accidents – over 30,000 gun deaths a year. To put that in perspective, the faulty General Motors ignition switch at the heart of the current massive recall has been blamed for 13 deaths. Not 13,000. Not 130. Thirteen.
Experts believe that a high proportion of gun deaths are preventable. David Hemenway, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, has been an advocate of the public health approach to gun deaths for decades. I first met him when I was writing about this subject for The Economist in the late 1990s. The NRA annual meeting prompted me to call Professor Hemenway and ask what his top three reforms would be if our goal were to reduce unnecessary gun deaths.
Here are three sensible policy changes that would enable Americans to keep their guns and not die from them, too:
Universal background checks to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. Unlike drugs, just about every gun starts out legal. (You can make heroin in the remote regions of Afghanistan; you can’t make a handgun that way.) Regulations that make it harder for legal guns to end up in the hands of criminals and psychopaths will make it less likely that those criminals or psychopaths rob or shoot the rest of us.
More responsibility on the part of manufacturers for producing safer guns. The phrase “safer gun” may seem like an oxymoron; it’s not. There are many ways that gun technology can be improved to reduce inadvertent harm. Guns can be childproofed, so that young children cannot fire them. Guns can be equipped with “smart chips” so they cannot be fired by anyone but the owner. (This makes them both safer and less likely to be stolen.) Recording the unique ballistic fingerprint on every firearm would make it possible to trace any gun used in a crime back to its owner.
Lean on gun dealers to do much more to prevent “straw purchases,” in which a person buys a gun legally with the express intent of passing it on to someone who cannot buy a gun legally (e.g. a convicted felon). We do not consider it acceptable for retailers to sell liquor to people who are underage. So why is this practice in the gun trade not more rigorously opposed, including by gun enthusiasts? Let me connect the dots: If it is harder for bad people to get guns, then fewer bad people will have guns.
The NRA and the most steadfast gun rights advocates oppose these policy changes as well as the public health approach to reducing gun violence in general. Opponents typically subscribe to the “slippery slope” argument: If the government is allowed to require background checks or to promote “smart guns,” then soon all conventional guns will be banned.
This is sadly tragic logic. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, traffic fatalities per mile driven have fallen more than 80 percent since the 1950s. We’ve cracked down on deadly behaviors like drunk driving. We’ve used data to reduce other risk factors (such as young drivers driving at night or with other teens in the car). We put airbags in every new car and required seat belts.
Lots of people are alive today as a result. I may be one of them. When our Ford Explorer rolled over at 65 mph on an interstate highway in 2001, my wife and I were wearing seat belts and our two children were in car seats; we were relatively unhurt.
These kinds of changes are not costless. In the 1980s the major car companies argued that airbags were far too expensive to ever become a standard feature. Technology solved that problem; the same companies now use safety as a selling point. Most important, we have saved a lot of lives without fundamentally changing the driving experience.
So let’s do that for guns. The public health approach seems like an end run around a pro-gun versus anti-gun debate that is getting us nowhere. We have the potential to prevent tragedy – while still respecting the basic rights of responsible gun owners – if we focus on one crucial fact: guns and gun deaths are distinctly different things. I’ve never met anyone who is in favor of the latter.
By: Charles Wheelan, U. S. News and World Report, April 29, 2014
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