“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
“A Rising Up From Within”: NRA Members Need To Step Up On Ending Gun Violence
Please, Mr. Bloomberg… leave the checkbook open, but step away from the podium.
Your efforts to curb gun violence and improve firearms safety are notable. The National Rifle Association thanks you.
For years, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has been the best membership recruitment tool the NRA could hope for: a walking, talking, Big Gulp-banning embodiment of government overreach. And look what he’s done now… given the NRA yet another gift on the eve of their national convention.
In Bloomberg’s mind, his new national organization, Everytown for Gun Safety, is is a much-needed counter to the NRA: a grassroots effort that will encourage pro-gun-control voters to step up to the polls, press for expanding background checks at the state and national levels, and make sure states keep guns away from the dangerously mentally ill and domestic-violence offenders.
Everytown for Gun Safety seeks to accomplish virtually everything the NRA has opposed in recent years. Its agenda is filled with action that needs to happen to ensure more Americans don’t die by gunfire, whether accidental, suicidal or homicidal. And Bloomberg, a billionaire, is bankrolling it with $50 million.
That’s not the problem. What is worrisome is that Bloomberg plans on chairing the new group. At this point, he seems determined to be its most out-front face.
Great. He might as well have just handed the NRA talking points for its Indianapolis convention, which begins April 25.
The sad fact about the gun debate in America is that the voices on the extremes are the loudest, and they drown out those in the middle. Yes, there is a middle ground. Bloomberg just rarely conveys it.
In an interview with The New York Times to announce Everytown, he praised himself for his good deeds: “If there is a God, when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.”
This declaration was made with a smile, but the joke reveals one of Bloomberg’s qualities, his arrogance, which has a way of putting off even those of us who agree that secondhand cigarette smoke is dangerous, trans fats are unhealthy and large sugary soft drinks are a dietary scourge. And, oh yes, guns need to be better controlled.
But it wasn’t the common-sense messaging that took the lead following the introduction of Everytown for Gun Safety. No, it was Bloomberg.
The Washington Times didn’t waste an opportunity to twit the great potentate on his pompous gates-of-heaven-quote. Its editorial was headlined “Sainthood for gun-grabbing ex-Mayor Bloomberg.” The piece painted Bloomberg as a money-wasting loser, making great sport of the pro-gun-control candidates he has backed who have lost elections.
In truth, NRA-bankrolled candidates have also seen their share of defeat in recent elections. But that’s the sort of fact-check that both sides conveniently leave out. It’s in the middle ground where reason lies, where the really effective mobilizing needs to occur.
Want to move gun control efforts in this country? Energize the former or current NRA members who believe the organization no longer represents their interests.
They’re out there. The hunters, marksmen and concealed-carry license holders who readily acknowledge that violent crime is down and that there is little use for a hunter to have a military-grade weapon. Peruse hunter listservs and listen to people talk about fearing the hyped-up shooters who carry magazines to track small game like quail. Listen to families who have lost members to suicides — deaths that could have been prevented had a gun been locked away from a depressed person.
Vilifying the NRA can actually be counterproductive. It merely puffs up the organization’s most alarmist elements.
What really needs to happen is a change of thinking within the NRA membership: a rising up from within the ranks of the calm and reasonable gun owners. The stage is wide open for an effective spokesperson. Maybe a celebrity with a passion for hunting and a deep conviction that stopping many of the 31,000 American deaths to gunfire each year is not only doable, it’s an American obligation.
For all the good he has accomplished, Bloomberg just isn’t the man for that cause.
By: Mary Sanchez, The National Memo, April 22, 2014
“We Live In States Of Insanity”: Trigger Happy In The Gunshine State
Doug Varrieur likes to shoot.
Problem is, it’s 25 miles to the nearest range, where they charge $45 an hour. What’s a gun enthusiast to do?
Lucky for him, Varrieur lives in Florida. Problem solved. Just erect a makeshift range in the back yard and fire away. It’s perfectly legal.
Re-read that if you want. It’s just as nutty the second time around.
In a story by my colleague Cammy Clark that appeared in Sunday’s Miami Herald, we learn that Varrieur, who lives on Big Pine Key, once complained to a gun-shop owner about what a pain it was going to the range to shoot. The owner put him onto Florida statute 790.15, which lists the conditions under which one may not legally discharge a firearm in the state. Turns out there aren’t many. You may not shoot “in any public place or on the right-of-way of any paved public road, highway or street,” over any road, highway or occupied premises, or “recklessly or negligently” at your own home.
Otherwise, let ‘er rip.
There are no mandatory safety requirements. Indeed, the language about recklessness and negligence was only added in 2011. Prior to that, apparently, it was even legal to blast at shadows and hallucinations, assuming you did so in your own back yard. Shooting actual people is presumably still illegal, though the family of the late Trayvon Martin might beg to differ.
Because he is a responsible gun owner, Varrieur, who has been shooting in his back yard once a week for a month, took precautions, even though, again, he is not required to. They include a wooden backstop seven feet high, eight feet wide and a foot thick.
Can you imagine living next door to this guy? Worse, can you imagine living next door to a Doug Varrieur who doesn’t take the precautions the law says he doesn’t have to bother with?
For what it’s worth, even Varrieur thinks the law is too “loose” and would like to see safety precautions mandated. County Commissioner George Neugent, also a gun owner, says the law is “a little scary.”
Ya think?
They call Florida the “gunshine state.” But this madness is not Florida-centric. In Colorado, you can have a gun in class. In Arizona, you can take one to the bar. In Georgia, they’re trying to make it legal to take one to church. So this isn’t just Florida. It’s America. We live in states of insanity.
As it happens, I have been corresponding with a reader who wrote me with what I regarded as promising ideas for moving the gun-rights argument forward. They included mandatory gun-safety training and mandatory liability insurance.
The dialogue faltered on his contention that he needs his gun because crime is spiraling out of control, and the country is not as safe as it was 20 years ago.
This, of course, is false: Crime is at historic lows. In 1993, according to the FBI, the violent-crime rate was 747.1 per 100,000 people. In 2012, the most recent year for which figures are available, it was 386.9. Almost 10,000 fewer people were murdered in 2012 than in 1993.
My reader was impressed with none of this. “Forget stats,” he said, “talk to victims.” If I did, I’d learn that road rage and knockout incidents are way up and that nightly, there are home invasions, robberies, stabbings and, ahem, shootings.
His insistence on perception over fact is emblematic of the nation we’ve become, so terrified by local TV news and its over-reportage of street crime that we think every shadow has eyes and we need guns in school, the bar, the movies, church.
Until some of us get over this media-driven paranoia, even promising ideas for ending the guns impasse are doomed. So I will close with some words of advice to anyone thinking of visiting or living in Florida or any other state of American insanity. One word, actually:
Duck.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., The National Memo, January 29, 2014
“We Need Gun Control To Stop More Than Criminals”: Gun Violence Isn’t Only Committed By Classic Criminals
Opponents of any kind of gun restrictions argue that they are meaningless, since criminals by definition don’t follow the law, and therefore won’t allow gun laws to hamstring their criminal behavior. That’s true. But gun violence isn’t only committed by classic criminals, as recent gun-related tragedies show.
There’s the 12-year-old who apparently took a shotgun out of a musical instrument case and shot and injured two classmates at a middle school in New Mexico. His behavior would make him a criminal (and what is a 12-year-old doing with a gun?). But most likely, his classmates and teachers did not see him as your basic law-breaker. He was, the Los Angeles Times reports, a bright but distant boy. He was able to get a gun because his family is a gun family, enjoying hunting. Are they criminals? It doesn’t sound like it. The boy simply had easy access to a gun, without which he would not have been able to do the damage he has done. We don’t yet know the circumstances of the origin of the gun used, but could the tragedy have been averted had there been mandatory safety stopgaps – either on the weapon itself, or with a requirement that the guns be kept in a locked structure?
A man in Florida, meanwhile, shot and killed a fellow movie-goer after said viewer refused to stop texting. The annoyance of the shooter is more than understandable – and many of us might have no problem with grabbing a phone from a theater-goer, throwing it on the floor and stomping on it – but the fact that this man felt he could shoot and kill someone for behaving so boorishly is alarming. Is he a criminal? It didn’t sound like it, based on evidence from before the shooting. In fact, he was a retired police office with a spotless record. And early reports indicate he thought he was being threatened (turns out the “threat” may have just been thrown popcorn). The point is he had a gun, had it with him in a movie theater, and could not have killed someone if he had not had the weapon with him. If people were not allowed to carry concealed weapons into the theater, this particular tragedy may not have happened.
On Wednesday night, a gunman opened fire at an Indiana grocery store, killing two people with a semi-automatic weapon before police shot and killed the gunman. That offender may well have been a classic criminal before the episode. We may never know, as he can’t tell us his back-story. If he was a troubled person (and his behavior suggests that he was), would a simple background check have kept him from getting such a gun?
Ban guns and only criminals will have guns, we are told. Put restrictions on gun ownership, or require people to undergo background checks first, and we will only make it harder for law-abiding citizens to get guns for protection, gun rights advocates say. They are right on both counts. But it would still prevent a great many murders.
By: Susan Milligan, Washington Whispers, U.S. News and World Report, January 16, 2014
“Who Needs A Gun?”: Most Of Us, Including Many Current Gun Owners, Don’t Have A Good Reason To Keep Guns In Their Homes
In September, Navy Yard; in November, a racially fraught shooting in Michigan and a proposed “stand-your-ground law” in Ohio; now the first anniversary of the Newtown massacre — there’s no avoiding the brutal reality of guns in America. Once again, we feel the need to say something, but we know the old arguments will get us nowhere. What’s the point of another impassioned plea or a new subtlety of constitutional law or further complex analyses of statistical data?
Our discussions typically start from the right to own a gun, go on to ask how, if at all, that right should be limited, and wind up with intractable disputes about the balance between the right and the harm that can come from exercising it. I suggest that we could make more progress if each of us asked a more direct and personal question: Should I own a gun?
A gun is a tool, and we choose tools based on their function. The primary function of a gun is to kill or injure people or animals. In the case of people, the only reason I might have to shoot them — or threaten to do so — is that they are immediately threatening serious harm. So a first question about owning a gun is whether I’m likely to be in a position to need one to protect human life. A closely related question is whether, if I were in such a position, the gun would be available and I would be able to use it effectively.
Unless you live in (or frequent) dangerous neighborhoods or have family or friends likely to threaten you, it’s very unlikely that you’ll need a gun for self-defense. Further, counterbalancing any such need is the fact that guns are dangerous. If I have one loaded and readily accessible in an emergency (and what good is it if I don’t?), then there’s a non-negligible chance that it will lead to great harm. A gun at hand can easily push a family quarrel, a wave of depression or a child’s curiosity in a fatal direction.
Even when a gun makes sense in principle as a means of self-defense, it may do more harm than good if I’m not trained to use it well. I may panic and shoot a family member coming home late, fumble around and allow an unarmed burglar to take my gun, have a cleaning or loading accident. The N.R.A. rightly sets high standards for gun safety. If those unable or unwilling to meet these standards gave up their guns, there might well be a lot fewer gun owners.
Guns do have uses other than defense against attackers. There may, for example, still be a few people who actually need to hunt to feed their families. But most hunting now is recreational and does not require keeping weapons at home. Hunters and their families would be much safer if the guns and ammunition were securely stored away from their homes and available only to those with licenses during the appropriate season. Target shooting, likewise, does not require keeping guns at home.
Finally, there’s the idea that citizens need guns so they can, if need be, oppose the force of a repressive government. Those who think there are current (or likely future) government actions in this country that would require armed resistance are living a paranoid fantasy. The idea that armed American citizens could stand up to our military is beyond fantasy.
Once we balance the potential harms and goods, most of us — including many current gun owners — don’t have a good reason to keep guns in their homes. This conclusion follows quite apart from whether we have a right to own guns or what restrictions should be put on this right. Also, the conclusion derives from what makes sense for each of us as individuals and so doesn’t require support from contested interpretations of statistical data.
I entirely realize that this line of thought will not convince the most impassioned gun supporters, who see owning guns as fundamental to their way of life. But about 70 million Americans own guns and only about four million belong to the N.R.A., which must include a large number of the most impassioned. So there’s reason to think that many gun owners would be open to reconsidering the dangers their weapons pose. Also, almost 30 percent of gun owners don’t think that guns make a household safer, and only 48 percent cite protection (rather than hunting, target shooting, etc.) as their main reason for having a gun.
It’s one thing to be horrified at gun violence. It’s something else to see it as a meaningful threat to your own existence. Our periodic shock at mass shootings and gang wars has little effect on our gun culture because most people don’t see guns as a particular threat to them. This is why opposition to gun violence has lacked the intense personal commitment of those who see guns as essential to their safety — or even their self-identity.
I’m not suggesting that opponents of gun violence abandon political action. We need to make it harder to buy guns (through background checks, waiting periods, etc.) both for those with criminal intentions and for law-abiding citizens who have no real need. But on the most basic level, much of our deadly violence occurs because we so often have guns readily available. Their mere presence makes suicide, domestic violence and accidents more likely. The fewer people with guns at hand, the less gun violence.
It’s easier to get people to see that they don’t want something than that they don’t have a right to it. Focusing on the need rather than the right to own a gun, many may well conclude that for them a gun is more a danger than a protection. Those fewer guns will make for a safer country.
By: Gary Gutting, The New York Times, December 10, 2013
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