“A Direct Correlation”: Stricter Gun Laws Mean Fewer Fatalities
A study released last week by JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association): Internal Medicine shows a direct correlation between gun laws and gun-related fatalities. While the study is mainly based on the number of gun laws, not the type (it doesn’t, for example, specify which particular laws are the most effective), it confirms that generally speaking, stricter gun laws result in fewer deaths.
The report, entitled “Firearm Legislation and Firearm-Related Fatalities in the United States,” developed a method for rating states depending on the degree of the gun laws in place. How far state laws go to control gun trafficking, effectiveness of a background-check system, focus on child safety, restriction on military-style assault weapons, and whether state laws allow individuals to carry guns in public places were all considered when ranking each state.
The states that come in at the top of the list for strong gun laws are Massachusetts, California, New Jersey, Connecticut and New York. Aside from California, which is closer to the median, these states also have the lowest average of firearms deaths per year. The states on the other end of the list—those with the most lenient gun laws—include Alaska, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Utah, all of which have among the highest percentage of deaths per year.
The authors conclude from their data that just owning a gun puts individuals at risk, and the federal government should focus on limiting gun ownership entirely. “One way that firearm legislation may act to reduce firearm fatalities is through reducing firearm prevalence. Studies have shown a strong connection between gun ownership and firearm suicide and firearm homicide,” says the report. “A cross-sectional study of all 50 states from 2001 to 2003 found that higher rates of household firearm ownership were associated with significantly higher rates of homicide.”
The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre has stood adamantly against the implementation of new federal gun laws, citing these measures as an all-out attack on responsible gun owners with a view to taking away their guns, and a complete waste of time since the government fails to enforce laws already in place. LaPierre has completely ignored and opposed proposals that include universal background checks, banning military-style weapons, and outlawing high-capacity magazines. During an interview, the NRA CEO tried to shift blame for growing gun violence when he said, “Look, a gun is a tool. The problem is the criminal.”
At the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), LaPierre said, “Across the board, violent crime in jurisdictions that recognize the right to carry is lower than in areas that prevent it.” During a January Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) repeated this statement nearly verbatim. The problem with this logic is that there are far too many exceptions when piecing together a direct connection between any one lax gun law and a decrease in gun-related violence—other factors in society can trigger an increase or decrease.
The JAMA study focuses on gun-related fatalities, as opposed to gun-related violence. It also doesn’t delve into the specificity of each law, but instead measures the efficacy of all gun laws in each respective state by assigning one point for every law passed, all while taking into consideration the magnitude of the laws and the state’s demographic data.
Read the results of the study here.
A 2004 study by The National Academies Press called “Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review” shows that since the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban (which expired in 2004) was passed, total murder rates and handgun murder rates have declined considerably.
In the 1990s, Congress voted to reduce funding for the Centers for Disease Control, a leading research source on gun control. Before the funding was cut, the CDC found that having a gun in the home put families at a far higher risk for suicide and homicide. President Obama signed an executive order that provides funding to the CDC for this type of research, which is telling of the president’s commitment to passing effective, sensible legislation.
LaPierre, Sen. Cruz, and other opponents of stricter gun laws can make claims that more lenient gun laws lead to a decrease in gun violence, but the data to support those claims is plainly non-existent. The JAMA study reiterates what a recent Quinnipiac University poll points out: A majority of Americans support stricter gun laws despite opposition from the NRA and NRA-funded Republicans—and it’s in the people’s best interests to do so.
By: Allison Brito, The National Memo, March 10, 2013
“A Patron Saint For Handguns?”: The Lizard Incident That Produced Wayne LaPierre And The NRA
When a new pope gets elected later this month, one of the many decisions he will face is whether to grant official recognition to anoint a Patron Saint of Handgunners.
The candidate is Saint Gabriel Possenti, a 19th century Italian monk who allegedly saved a village from bandits with a handgun before dying of tuberculosis at 23.
The St. Gabriel Possenti Society established itself over 20 years ago with the sole purpose of getting Possenti recognized as handgun enthusiasts’ official saint, agitating and campaigning on his behalf. The 501(c)3 charity group, whose seal includes a drawing of Possenti and a revolver, encourages members to lobby local clergymen, write letters to Vatican officials, and “obtain numerous Gun Saint tokens and deposit them in church collection baskets of your denomination.”
According to the group, Saint Gabriel Possenti saved the villagers of Isola del Gran Sasso from a marauding gang of 20 renegade soldiers by demonstrating his marksmanship with a revolver in 1860. When the gangsters (whom the group notes were also “would-be rapists”) descended on the town, Possenti fired at a lizard in the road and killed it with a single shot.
The bandits, terrified by his excellent shot, fled the town and the day was saved. “St. Gabriel Possenti performed this feat of courage without causing physical harm to a single human being,” they note.
The legend, however, may be little more than that, as some allege the gun incident never occurred. One website dedicated to the saint notes that the tale only appears in one of the four biographies on Possenti, and that the author of the relevant one, Rev. Godfrey Poage, acknowledged that “some of the accounts in his book were invented to ‘enliven’ the story.” Furthermore, Possenti died only two years later and thus would likely have been in late stages of tuberculosis, the critics note, and thus in no shape to fight off 20 armed gangsters.
In a statement sent today marking the upcoming feast day of the saint, Society Chairman John Snyder acknowledged the historical dispute and defended the “lizard incident.”
“The Poage account of the lizard incident remained non-controversial for over a quarter of a century. It wasn’t until I began promoting St. Gabriel Possenti as a Patron of Handgunners in the late 1980s that anti-gun bigots began a belated attempt to attack the account of the lizard incident. It seems they are more concerned with being politically correct than historically accurate,” Snyder said.
Snyder wrote a whole book about the incident, “Gun Saint,” which features an illustration of the young Saint Gabriel Possenti firing a gun as bearded gangsters flee in all directions.
The group even claims biblical passages support the use of guns for self-defense. You can read about them in a printed monograph, which the Society will send to you for a reasonable contribution of $10.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, February 21, 2013
“No Right Is Absolute”: Assault Weapons Are Weapons Of Mass Destruction And Should Be Banned
The tragedy in Connecticut forces America to confront a simple question: Why should we allow easy access to a weapon of mass destruction just because it could conceivably be referred to as a “gun”?
I count myself among the many Americans who at various points in their lives have owned and used long guns — hunting rifles and shotguns — for hunting and target shooting. No one I know in politics seriously proposes that ordinary Americans be denied the right to own those kinds of weapons.
But guns used for hunting have nothing in common with assault weapons like the ones that were used last week in the mass murder of 20 first-graders — except the fact that they are referred to “guns.”
Rapid-fire assault weapons with large clips of ammunition have only one purpose: the mass slaughter of large numbers of human beings. They were designed for use by the military to achieve that mission in combat — and that mission alone.
No one argues that other combat weapons like rocket-propelled grenades (RPG’s) or Stinger Missiles should be widely available to anyone at a local gun shop. Why in the world should we allow pretty much anyone to have easy access to assault weapons?
Every politician in America will tell you they will move heaven and earth to prevent weapons of mass destruction from falling into the hands of terrorists. Yet we have allowed the ban on this particular weapon of mass destruction to expire. As a result, a terrorist named Adam Lanza was able to have easy access to the assault weapons he used to kill scores of children in minutes.
Let’s be clear, Adam Lanza was a terrorist just as surely as he would have been if we were motivated by an extreme jihadist ideology. It makes no difference to those children or to their grieving families whether their loved ones were killed by someone who was mentally deranged or by someone who believed that by killing children he was helping to destroying the great Satan.
When an individual is willing — or perhaps eager — to die making a big “statement” by killing many of his fellow human beings, it doesn’t matter what their motivation is. It does matter whether they have easy access to the weapons that make mass murder possible.
And after last week, can anyone seriously question whether assault weapons are in fact weapons of mass destruction? If Lanza had conventional guns — or like a man in China who recently went berserk, he only had knives — he would not have been physically capable of killing so many people in a few short minutes.
Of course you hear people say — oh, a car or an airliner can be turned into a weapon of mass destruction — many things can become weapons of mass destruction. And there is no question after 9/11 that we know that this is true. But cars and airliners have to be converted from their primary use in order to become instruments of mass death. It takes an elaborate plot and many actors to take over an airliner and it isn’t easy to methodically kill 27 people with a car.
More important, assault weapons have no redeeming social value or alternative use whatsoever. The only reason to purchase an assault weapon, instead of a long gun used for target practice or hunting, is to kill and maim large numbers of human beings.
And it is not the case that if assault weapons were banned ordinary people would get them anyway. We certainly don’t take that attitude with nuclear weapons or dirty bombs. We make it very hard for a terrorist to get nuclear weapons or dirty bomb. It used to be hard to get assault weapons.
When the former President of Mexico visited the United States some time ago to discuss the drug-fueled violence on the Mexican border, he pointed out that the end of the assault weapons ban in the U.S. had resulted in an explosion of smuggling of assault weapons from the United States to Mexico. Weapons that were previously unavailable in large numbers, became plentiful. He begged the United States to re-impose the assault weapons ban.
Allowing easy access to assault weapons guarantees that terrorists, criminals and mentally unstable people will use them to commit future acts of mass murder — it’s that simple. There are seven billion people on the planet. Try as we may, we are not going to prevent some of those seven billion people from becoming terrorists, criminals or mentally unstable. Why make it easy for them to do harm to their fellow human beings by giving them easy access to a weapon of mass destruction?
Since this tragedy, there have been calls for greater restrictions and background checks on those who can buy guns — and there should be. But from all accounts, the weapons used in the Connecticut murders were purchased legally by the shooter’s mother — who herself appeared to be perfectly sane right up to the moment that Lanza used those same weapons to end her life.
The NRA will no doubt repeat its mantra about the “slippery slope.” “If we ban assault weapons, shotguns will be next,” they say. Really? By banning anyone from buying Stinger Missiles that are used to shoot down airplanes do we make it more likely that the government will one day prevent people from hunting ducks?
The simple fact is that no right is absolute because rights come into conflict with each other. Your free speech does not give you the right to cry “fire” in a crowded theater.
Is the NRA’s concern that banning assault weapons will put us on a “slippery slope” more important than the lives of those 20 first graders? Should it really take precedence over the fact that today in Newtown, Connecticut there are 20 families with holiday presents on a closet shelf, that were purchased for an excited six-year-old who will never open them?
Are the NRA’s fears more important than the terror faced by children in the Sandy Hook Elementary school last week?
Does the right to own an assault weapon take precedence over the right of those parents to see their children grow up, and graduate from college, and stand at the alter to be married, and have children of their own?
The bottom line is that there is no reason why weapons of mass destruction of any sort – chemical weapons, biological weapons, RPG’s, improvised explosive devices (IED’s), missiles, dirty bombs, nuclear devices, or assault weapons — should be easily accessible. For 10 years there was a ban on the production, ownership and use of assault weapons in the United States until Congress and the Bush Administration allowed it to lapse when it sunset and came up for reauthorization in 2004.
A serious response to the tragedy in Connecticut requires that Congress act to reinstate the assault weapons ban before the children of other families fall victim to the fantasies of some other mentally unbalanced individual — or the ideology of a terrorist who has been empowered by our failure to act.
By: Robert Creamer, February 18, 2013; Originally Posted in The Huffington Post Blog, December 16, 2012
“The Ignorance Caucus”: Republicans Are Unable To Apply Critical Thinking And Evidence To Policy Questions
Last week Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, gave what his office told us would be a major policy speech. And we should be grateful for the heads-up about the speech’s majorness. Otherwise, a read of the speech might have suggested that he was offering nothing more than a meager, warmed-over selection of stale ideas.
To be sure, Mr. Cantor tried to sound interested in serious policy discussion. But he didn’t succeed — and that was no accident. For these days his party dislikes the whole idea of applying critical thinking and evidence to policy questions. And no, that’s not a caricature: Last year the Texas G.O.P. explicitly condemned efforts to teach “critical thinking skills,” because, it said, such efforts “have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”
And such is the influence of what we might call the ignorance caucus that even when giving a speech intended to demonstrate his openness to new ideas, Mr. Cantor felt obliged to give that caucus a shout-out, calling for a complete end to federal funding of social science research. Because it’s surely a waste of money seeking to understand the society we’re trying to change.
Want other examples of the ignorance caucus at work? Start with health care, an area in which Mr. Cantor tried not to sound anti-intellectual; he lavished praise on medical research just before attacking federal support for social science. (By the way, how much money are we talking about? Well, the entire National Science Foundation budget for social and economic sciences amounts to a whopping 0.01 percent of the budget deficit.)
But Mr. Cantor’s support for medical research is curiously limited. He’s all for developing new treatments, but he and his colleagues have adamantly opposed “comparative effectiveness research,” which seeks to determine how well such treatments work.
What they fear, of course, is that the people running Medicare and other government programs might use the results of such research to determine what they’re willing to pay for. Instead, they want to turn Medicare into a voucher system and let individuals make decisions about treatment. But even if you think that’s a good idea (it isn’t), how are individuals supposed to make good medical choices if we ensure that they have no idea what health benefits, if any, to expect from their choices?
Still, the desire to perpetuate ignorance on matters medical is nothing compared with the desire to kill climate research, where Mr. Cantor’s colleagues — particularly, as it happens, in his home state of Virginia — have engaged in furious witch hunts against scientists who find evidence they don’t like. True, the state has finally agreed to study the growing risk of coastal flooding; Norfolk is among the American cities most vulnerable to climate change. But Republicans in the State Legislature have specifically prohibited the use of the words “sea-level rise.”
And there are many other examples, like the way House Republicans tried to suppress a Congressional Research Service report casting doubt on claims about the magical growth effects of tax cuts for the wealthy.
Do actions like this have important effects? Well, consider the agonized discussions of gun policy that followed the Newtown massacre. It would be helpful to these discussions if we had a good grasp of the facts about firearms and violence. But we don’t, because back in the 1990s conservative politicians, acting on behalf of the National Rifle Association, bullied federal agencies into ceasing just about all research into the issue. Willful ignorance matters.
O.K., at this point the conventions of punditry call for saying something to demonstrate my evenhandedness, something along the lines of “Democrats do it too.” But while Democrats, being human, often read evidence selectively and choose to believe things that make them comfortable, there really isn’t anything equivalent to Republicans’ active hostility to collecting evidence in the first place.
The truth is that America’s partisan divide runs much deeper than even pessimists are usually willing to admit; the parties aren’t just divided on values and policy views, they’re divided over epistemology. One side believes, at least in principle, in letting its policy views be shaped by facts; the other believes in suppressing the facts if they contradict its fixed beliefs.
In her parting shot on leaving the State Department, Hillary Clinton said of her Republican critics, “They just will not live in an evidence-based world.” She was referring specifically to the Benghazi controversy, but her point applies much more generally. And for all the talk of reforming and reinventing the G.O.P., the ignorance caucus retains a firm grip on the party’s heart and mind.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 10, 2013
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