“Fact Is No Match For Fear”: For Every Gun Used To Wound Or Kill In Self-Defense, Four Are Used In Accidental Shootings
It was the kind of a statistic that would have left a sane country stunned and shamed.
This country barely noticed it.
It came last month, courtesy of the Washington Post, which reported that, as of mid-October, toddlers in America have been shooting people this year at a rate of one a week. You know how the story goes. Little one finds an inadequately-secured gun and starts playing with it, too young to know that death lurks inside. The thing goes off with a bang, leaving a hole — sometimes a fatal one — in human flesh.
Sometimes it’s Da-da. Sometimes, it’s Nana. Sometimes, it’s the toddler himself.
That’s how it was for Darnal Mundy II. As detailed by Charles Rabin in Tuesday’s Miami Herald, Darnal, age 3, was looking for an iPad one morning in early August when he climbed a chair and opened the top drawer of his father’s dresser. Instead of a tablet computer, he found a Smith & Wesson. With the gun pointing directly at his face, he pulled the trigger. A .40-caliber bullet struck him between the eyes, exiting the left side of his skull.
Improbably, Darnal survived. More improbably after brain surgery and rehab in a Miami hospital, he is walking, talking, laughing and playing and has recently begun feeding himself. Darnal still lacks full use of his right arm and leg, but seems, in most other respects, to be perfectly fine, not counting the depressed area on the left side of his head where doctors removed a piece of his skull.
He and his family, it seems superfluous to say, were very lucky. Indeed, they were blessed.
The gun that so nearly proved fatal is now kept disassembled in a safe. We do not know why Darnal’s father, who works as a fitness attendant, feels the need to own it in the first place. But who would be shocked if it turned out that he keeps it for home security? Putting aside the crackpots who think they’re going to have to defend Texas against the U.S. Army, that seems the most common rationale for gun ownership. People fear being caught empty-handed when the bad guys come.
It is, of course, a fear completely at odds with statistical fact.
Like the fact that, according to the FBI, crime has fallen to historic lows and your life, property and person are safer now than they have been in decades.
Like the fact that, according to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, for every gun that is used to wound or kill in self-defense, four are used in accidental shootings.
Like the fact that toddlers are now shooting themselves and others at the rate of one a week.
But it’s not just that fact is no match for fear; it’s that we live in a media culture that has the effect of maintaining fear in perpetuity, keeping it a low-grade fever simmering within the body politic, a heat that abides, but never abates.
A 2014 study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, found that exposure to violent crime on TV dramas intensifies the fear that one may become a victim. “CSI,” anyone? And a 2003 study from the same source found that the more people watch local TV news — where if it bleeds, it leads — the greater their fear of crime.
And here, it bears repeating: We have less to fear from crime now than we’ve had in many years.
But, though lacking cause to fear, we fear just the same, fear all the more, making life and death decisions about personal security based on perceptions that have little to do with reality. We fixate on stopping the stranger kicking in the front door. Meantime, there goes the toddler, balancing atop the chair, chubby little hands closing on the gun in the top drawer.
The irony is as sharp as the bang of a gunshot down the hall. We fear so many things. But some things, we don’t fear nearly enough.
By: Leonard Pitts,Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald: The National Memo, November 9, 2015
“Gun Industry Must Not Be Shielded From Liability”: Bloodshed Is Moving The Needle On The Question Of Liability For The Gun Industry
Hillary Clinton pounded Sen. Bernie Sanders for his gun rights record during the first Democratic presidential debate, all but calling him a BFF of the NRA.
Clinton’s argument was that Sanders’ support for the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which prohibited lawsuits against gun sellers and manufacturers for the unlawful misuse of a firearm, means that he isn’t serious about stemming gun violence in America.
With his vote, Clinton charged, Sanders supplied immunity from liability to the only industry in America that has it. “Everybody else has to be accountable but not the gun manufacturers,” she said. As a senator, Clinton had voted against the bill.
She might not have been aware that within hours of her comments, that law — long considered nearly insurmountable — had taken a major hit. A Milwaukee jury awarded two police officers more than $5 million in damages, holding the owners of a gun store negligent for selling a semi-automatic pistol purchased through a straw buyer.
One of the officers, Graham Kunisch, now retired, was said to not show any emotion when the civil verdict was reached, according to the New York Times. He couldn’t, his lawyer said, because of the brain injury he suffered after being shot in the head by the gun.
Staff at Badger Guns, the defendant, should have been more suspicious that the pistol was being bought for an 18-year-old who stood alongside the straw buyer, attorneys argued. The younger man, now serving 80 years for shooting the policemen, strode into the store with the buyer, helped pick out the gun, left the store to get more cash together for the purchase, and watched as the straw buyer fumbled filling out the paperwork. On the form, the buyer admitted that he wasn’t the intended owner but then changed his answer.
Red flags had been everywhere, the plaintiffs’ attorneys argued. The jury agreed. That almost never happens in America. One of the reasons it doesn’t is a 2005 law that Clinton says she intends to repeal (and that Sanders agrees needs to be revisited).
The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act passed after major lobbying by the National Rifle Association. George W. Bush signed it. To the gun lobby, the bill was seen as necessary to protect the gun dealers and manufacturers from being bankrupted by a slew of cases being filed nationwide at the time.
Gun safety advocates had a strategy to move manufacturers toward devoting more attention to safety features on firearms and for sellers to improve ways to ensure that they were selling to legal buyers.
The idea was to treat gun safety as a matter of public health. Car manufacturers, after all, hadn’t eagerly added seatbelts and other safety devices to vehicles. They did so under public pressure and after being held accountable by the courts.
Passage of the immunity law circumvented that approach to the manufacture and sale of firearms.
But times have changed in the decade since the law was passed. The public is all too aware of the toll of firearm violence: dead children slaughtered in mass shootings, women murdered because men with records of domestic violence aren’t stopped from buying guns, a yearly toll of 19,000 gun suicides. Bloodshed is moving the needle on the question of liability for the gun industry. But only a smidgen.
The NRA has filled people’s heads with the nonsense that it is unfair to expect a seller to know whether a gun he sells will be used later in a crime. Really? Even if the gun is sold to a known criminal, someone under age or a person with a record of domestic violence?
What’s missing are the other pieces of smart gun safety. Gun shows should no longer be places where guns are bought and sold without any scrutiny. The tracking of guns that wind up at crime scenes must improve. Records of who should be barred from ownership need to be readily accessible and comprehensive. And the public needs to come to grips with the fact that there are no magic formulas to predict who might act out violently with a gun due to a mental health condition. Most people with mental illness are not violent.
A great sense of responsibility ought to come with being licensed to sell a product designed to take human life. It’s far past time that gun manufacturers and sellers come to grips with that moral and civic duty.
By: Mary Sanchez, Opinion-Page Columnist for The Kansas City Star; The National Memo, October 16, 2015
“Ben Carson Gives New Meaning To Crazy”: He’s Managed To Prove He Has Lost More Than A Few Shingles Off His Roof
For more than a few months many campaign experts and pundits have been trying to figure out how and why semi-prominent surgeon and political nut-boy Ben Carson has been doing so well in the Republican race for president. He has maintained healthy numbers in the polls and seems locked into a strong second place position in a field of candidates where experience and common sense are viewed as huge liabilities.
But it wasn’t until last week that Carson managed to prove he has lost more than a few shingles off his roof. Ben has his own space program going and he’s out there on the fringe talking nonsense in a soft, nonthreatening manner that is quite similar to the voice level heard among so many sitting sadly by themselves today in Day Rooms of mental institutions, off in a corner, wearing paper slippers, slowly eating apple sauce, unaware that nobody is listening.
Somewhat incredibly though, a small percentage of people are listening to Gentle Ben. And he is indeed running for president of the United States. And each day he takes the field and gives new meaning to crazy.
A few days ago, Ben was asked about the latest mass shooting on a college campus in Oregon where nine died because a mentally deranged young guy had 14 guns and no girlfriend. WWBD: What would Ben do?
“I’m glad you asked that question,” one of the two leading presidential candidates of the Republican Party replied. “because not only would I not probably not co-operate with him, I would not just stand there and let him shoot me. I would say, ‘Hey guys, everybody attack him. He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all.’”
And there it is. Ben is clearly a movie buff.
Ben probably saw himself as Little Bill in Unforgiven who was confronted by William Munny in a saloon showdown. Little Bill was a bad-ass sheriff, a bully who had beaten to death Munny’s only friend, Ned, and hung the body outside the saloon.
In the scene that perhaps excited Ben, Little Bill is promising free drinks and prattling an empty-headed moron, a guy the crowd listens to because he’s wearing a badge. Little Bill is surprised though as Munny arrives, rifle in hand and shoots the skinny bar owner. Then Little Bill and William Munny confront one another.
“Well, sir, “ Little Bill says, “You are a cowardly son of a bitch because you have just shot down an unarmed man.”
“He should have armed himself if he was gonna’ decorate his saloon with the body of my friend,” Munny tells Little Bill.
At that moment, Little Bill seems to recognize Munny and says, “I guess you are Three-Fingered Jack out of Missouri, killer of women and children,” And Munny tells him, “I have done that…killed women and children. I have killed most everything that walks or crawls and now I have come to kill you, Little Bill, for what you done to Ned.”
Right here is where Ben Carson starts taking notes. He must have been mesmerized because, clearly, it has had a huge impact on his outlook.
“He’s got one barrel left, gentlemen, “ Little Bill announces to his saloon pals who are either cowering or heading for the nearest exit. “After he has used it, pull your pistols and shoot him down like the cowardly, drunken scoundrel he is.”
Ben wanted the students at that Oregon Community College to charge the shooter. After all, he only had four weapons on him. If Ben had more time to think he probably would have woven a few scenes from Saving Private Ryan into his answer. After all, the Germans on the bluff above Omaha Beach had multiple weapons but they were beaten back because we charged them.
A few days later, Ben was on CNN where he insisted that the number of Holocaust victims would have been greatly reduced if more Jewish people in Europe owned guns. Here he is on that topic: “I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed.”
(We pause here for a quick, commercial-free reminder: This guy, Ben Carson, is running for president of the United States and according to many polls is placing second to Donald Trump as the potential candidate of one of two major American political parties, the Republican Party.)
His supporters list several reasons why they would consider voting for him: “He seems like a nice man. He speaks softly. He is a fine Christian. He speaks his mind.”
He is also a few quarts short of a gallon. But when it comes to Ben Carson’s preposterous campaign, count me in with Chauncey Gardiner who said in Being There: “I like to watch.”
By: Mike Barnicle, The Daily Beast, October 11, 2015
“A Useful Point Of Comparison”: With This Statistic, Canada Demonstrates What A Difference Gun Control Can Make
No mainstream American politician would ever propose to get rid of all guns. But what might happen if we seriously approached the issues of gun safety, licensing, and registration?
As a country that allows private gun ownership and also has a robust hunting culture, Canada offers a useful point of comparison with the United States. However, the two countries are quite different in terms of their gun control laws, and, as it happens, their gun murder rates: The United States has a whopping 89 firearms per 100 residents, the number-one rank in the world, while Canada’s guns are at 31 firearms per 100 people, putting it in the 13th place globally. The country also has a comprehensive system of gun licensing — with citizens required to take a safety course if they want to own and operate a gun, which is, after all, a dangerous piece of machinery.
Under Canada’s laws, handguns have been registered since 1934. Other changes in gun policy have occurred over the decades, including the creation in the 1970s of the Firearms Acquisition License, now known as a Possession and Acquisition License (PAL), which is a permit needed in order to purchase a gun. And licenses to carry guns in Canada are quite rare.
A centralized system of issuing gun licenses began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as part of a wave of gun control legislation brought forward by both the Conservative and Liberal parties. When the latter party came into office in 1993, much of the implementation became their task — and the new registration of long guns became a wedge issue in rural areas, particularly in western Canada where the Conservative Party would grow to dominate.
In 2012, under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the Conservative Party repealed the long gun registry and destroyed the records that had been amassed from it — but there are still records on “restricted” and “prohibited” guns, generally various forms of handguns and/or automatic weapons. (As the Royal Canadian Mounted Police makes very clear, the long gun registry repeal “does not change the requirement for all individuals to hold a licensee in order to possess a firearm.”) And not even the Conservatives would propose getting rid of the the handgun registry, safety courses, or gun licenses as they now exist.
So what difference, if any, might be gleaned from Canada’s focus on gun safety and efforts to keep weapons out of the wrong hands?
To start with a baseline, the United States has a population roughly nine times that of Canada, according to the most up-to-date figures from the U.S. Census Bureau and its northern counterpart, Statistics Canada.
In Canada in 2013, the most recent year for which numbers have been posted by Statistics Canada, there were a total of 505 homicides — which would be proportional to about 4,534 homicides in the United States.
But in the United States, according to the FBI, there were 12,253 homicides in 2013 — a factor of 2.9 times the Canadian equivalent.
Now let’s dig in a little further and look at the impact that gun violence might be having on these numbers. In the U.S. figures, 8,454 of these homicides — 69 percent — were committed with firearms, compared to only 26 percent in Canada — 131, or a U.S. equivalent of 1,179, which is less than 1/7th of America’s gun killings.
Of the non-gun killings — with various methods including stabbings, beatings, fire, poisoning, and so on — here the numbers are obviously much closer. The United States had 3,799 in 2013, while Canada had 374 — which would correspond to 3,366 in the United States, giving the U.S. a figure only 13 percent greater than Canada’s.
Or to put it more simply: Nearly the entire difference in the homicide numbers between the United States and Canada comes from guns.
But to quote the late, great American comedian Bill Hicks: “But there’s no connection — and you’d be a fool and a communist to make one — there’s no connection between having a gun and shooting someone with it, and not having a gun and not shooting someone.”
By: Eric Kleefeld, The National Memo, October 7, 2015
“Thoughts And Prayers Are Not Enough”: Obama, Yet Again, Calls For Gun-Control Laws
In what he acknowledged has become a familiar event, the president once again spoke to the nation after a mass shooting.
President Obama was blunt and unequivocal in his response to the shooting Thursday at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon that left 10 dead, “Our thoughts and prayers are not enough.”
“It’s not enough,” he continued. “It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel, and it does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted somewhere else in America — next week or a couple of months from now.”
He was explicit: In order to stem this “continuing cause of death for innocent people,” America needed to pass new laws.
The president said that this had become a dispiritingly routine event: The reporting is routine; his remarks, standing at the podium, were routine; the national conversation in the aftermath was routine; and the response from the guns-rights lobby, loudly balking at even the most modest regulations, was routine.
“We have become numb,” he said.
“It’s fair to say that anybody who does this has a sickness in their minds,” Obama said, addressing the specter of mental illness, another typical motif of our national post-shooting conversation. “But we are not the only country on Earth that has people with mental illnesses or want to do harm to other people. We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months.”
He asked that the media report on the numbers of Americans killed by terrorism as compared to the number killed by gun violence. He lamented that the nation could spend over $1 trillion, and devote entire agencies and reams of campaign rhetoric, to the fight against terrorism, but the most common-sense gun-control legislation can’t even make it through a filibuster.
Anticipating critics who would accuse him of politicizing the tragedy, Obama fired back: “This is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic.”
When people die in mining accidents, he said, we make mines safer. When people die in car accidents, we enact seatbelt laws. When roads are unsafe, we fix them. “The notion that gun violence is somehow different, that our freedom, that our Constitution prohibits any modest regulation of how we use a deadly weapon when there are law-abiding gun owners all across the country… It doesn’t make sense.”
States with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths, he noted. Claims by anti-gun-control opponents are “not borne out by the evidence.”
He enjoined voters who felt that gun control could and should be enacted to elect representatives who shared those beliefs and were prepared to act on them.
He reached out to law-abiding gun owners, whom he claimed polls showed supported background checks and closing the so-called gun show loophole, and asked them “to think about whether your views are being properly represented by the organization that suggests it’s speaking for you.”
He invoked the names of cities, towns, and schools marked by massacres, which have become bywords for gun violence: Columbine, Blacksburg, Aurora, Newtown, Tucson, Charleston.
And now Roseburg.
By: Sam Reisman, The National Memo, October 1, 2015
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