“Anyone Is Qualified Until Proven Otherwise”: Concealed-Carry Crazy; What Gun Lobbyists Mean When They Tout ‘Gun Safety’
Anyone who has paid even casual attention to pronouncements from the leadership of the National Rifle Association knows that they do not place a particularly high premium on facts or the truth. And while the news media get a passing grade for challenging the NRA on some of its most preposterous claims – the Obama administration is in cahoots with the U.N. to confiscate everyone’s guns — the gun lobby has largely gotten a free ride on gun safety.
Setting aside the fact that the NRA’s general legislative agenda is antithetical to the idea of public safety, consider CEO Wayne LaPierre’s claim that “no other organization in the world has spent more millions over more decades to keep Americans safe.” To many Americans, the NRA’s “family friendly” image rests on the safety and education efforts that are an integral part of its promotion of a culture of guns. These include everything from the “Eddie Eagle” coloring books it disseminates to school children, telling them to call an adult if they find a gun, to multiple courses on the safe use of firearms. The NRA calls itself “the world’s leader in firearm training,” and it may well be.
Yet it has never advocated any serious requirement that gun owners acquire even a modicum of proficiency in the actual handling or use of a firearm before being allowed to purchase one — because that would be “gun control.”
Every state in the union requires that a driver demonstrate some ability to keep a car on the road before receiving a driver’s license. But there is nothing in either federal or state law that requires an individual to have any knowledge of how to use a firearm before acquiring a single gun or a small arsenal. And it’s highly doubtful that the NRA’s eight-hour “Basic Pistol Shooting Course” or its “First Steps Pistol Orientation” class does much to prepare someone for a real-world armed confrontation.
The NRA’s position on gun safety really boils down to this pearl from LaPierre: “The presence of a firearm makes us all safer. It’s just that simple.”
Of course it’s never that simple. Ask the parents of the eight-year-old girl killed last week in Jefferson County, Tennessee, by her 11-year-old neighbor who used his dad’s 12-gauge shotgun to shoot the girl after she refused to let him see her puppy. Or ask the boy’s father if that shotgun made anyone safer.
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in 2008 in District of Columbia v. Heller, it is now the right of every American to keep a gun in the home for self-defense, even if that weapon is more likely to be used in an accidental shooting, a suicide, or a domestic dispute. Encouraging untrained citizens to keep a firearm at home for their personal safety is one thing; but a major thrust of NRA lobbying for the past two decades has been to enact concealed-carry laws that send those same untrained, armed citizens into the public square — to schools, college campuses, national parks, restaurants, the workplace, and on public transport, including Amtrak trains. And that’s where any claim by the NRA to champion public safety really falls apart.
The NRA may talk about “responsible” gun ownership, yet it gleefully helps to arm people who have demonstrated neither the skill to use a weapon in a high-stress situation (or any other circumstance), nor any knowledge of the laws pertaining to the use of weapons. Nor does the NRA seem to care about the mental stability of those who carry concealed weapons. As far as the NRA is concerned, anyone is qualified to carry a concealed until proven otherwise. In 2011, LaPierre told the NRA’s national convention: “Every American wife and mother and daughter, every law-abiding adult woman should be trained, armed, and encouraged to carry a firearm for personal protection.”
Today, every state in the union has enacted a concealed-carry law. Most, sadly, follow the NRA model, including few if any training requirements or provisions that restrict permits to those citizens with a demonstrated need.
So in Virginia and Iowa, blind people can obtain concealed-carry permits. In Virginia and several other states, residents may qualify for a concealed-carry permit by completing an online “course” that is virtually impossible to fail. I qualified for a Utah concealed-carry permit – which would allow me to carry a concealed weapon in fully 35 states because of state “reciprocity” laws — by listening to a six-hour lecture at a Maryland rifle range where I was required neither to pass a written exam nor to fire a single bullet. The overwhelming majority of states also have no requirement that concealed-carry permit holders demonstrate any facility in the use of a firearm. In 18 states where live-fire training is mandatory, standards for passing are extremely weak, based on target shooting scores, which have little correlation to using a gun in a high-stress combat situation.
A Department of Justice study of local law enforcement training back in 2006 found that police departments required a median 60 hours of firearms instruction. Better than 90 percent also required some training in simulated stressful conditions and in night or reduced light conditions. But you won’t find any requirement of that sort in state laws for concealed-carry permits. Unlike police who are frequently required to undergo some sort of re-qualification program, few if any states require concealed-carry licensees to demonstrate any sort of competence to use guns over time. Some states automatically grant concealed-carry permits without any classroom or live fire training to anyone who has served in the military. Although concealed-carry licensees were never intended to replace police or to undergo the same training as police, a little training couldn’t hurt.
Thirty years ago, hardly anyone anywhere in the U.S. could legally carry a concealed weapon. By the early 1990s, promoting concealed-carry had become one of the NRA’s top legislative priorities. By the beginning of 2012, the Government Accountability Office estimated that 8 million citizens had obtained concealed-carry permits. Two years later, the decidedly pro-gun Crime Prevention Research Center estimated that at least 11 million Americans could legally pack heat when they walked the streets.
The NRA thinks this is a sign of great progress because all of these secretly armed, wannabe Rambos will come to the rescue of fellow citizens in distress and make the bad guys more wary of committing crimes. But do most Americans really feel safer with 11 million largely untrained would-be “law enforcers” on the streets?
Even with the best training, studies show that police have a very hard time hitting their intended targets. New York City’s Police Department has some of the best-trained officers in the country. But when 12 Brooklyn cops opened fire on a fleeing gunman last month, only one of 84 shots fired hit the suspect. In 2013, police in Times Square opened fire on a man after he reached into his pocket for what the cops thought might be a gun. Three shots were fired. One round hit a 54-year-old woman in the knee. Another grazed a 35-year-old woman’s buttocks. None hit the suspect.
A RAND Corporation evaluation of NYPD firearm training between 1998 and 2006 found that the average hit rate in gun fights was about 18 percent. Where there was no return fire, the hit rate went up to 30 percent.
Given this not-so-great record for the best-trained police, what should the public expect from wholly untrained civilians?
Earlier this week, a 47-year-old woman with a concealed-carry permit reportedly fired three shots at an SUV leaving a Home Depot parking lot in Michigan after witnessing one of the store’s security guards chasing two shoplifters who jumped into the vehicle.
Thanks to the NRA, we can all look forward to more illegal shootings like that one, by self-appointed citizen “police” who are unlikely to hit anything — except an innocent bystander.
By: Alan Berlow, The National Memo, October 10, 2015
“The Byproduct Of A Tragic Myth”: You Don’t Need That Gun For Self-Defense
One of the most important pieces ever posted at Politico Magazine was written on January 14 by Evan DeFilippis and Devan Hughes. Titled The Myth Behind Defensive Gun Ownership, it’s worth revisiting again:
What do these and so many other cases have in common? They are the byproduct of a tragic myth: that millions of gun owners successfully use their firearms to defend themselves and their families from criminals. Despite having nearly no academic support in public health literature, this myth is the single largest motivation behind gun ownership. It traces its origin to a two-decade-old series of surveys that, despite being thoroughly repudiated at the time, persists in influencing personal safety decisions and public policy throughout the United States.
There is nothing beyond anecdotal evidence and one very flawed study suggesting that defensive use of firearms has benefits that outweigh the obvious societal drawbacks. The conclusion to the article needs to be ingrained into the DNA of the gun control debate:
The myth of widespread defensive gun use is at the heart of the push to weaken already near catatonic laws controlling the use of guns and expand where good guys can carry guns to bars, houses of worship and college campuses—all in the mistaken belief that more “good guys with guns” will help stop the “bad guys.” As Wayne LaPierre of the NRA railed in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun.”
But the evidence clearly shows that our lax gun laws and increased gun ownership, spurred on by this myth, do not help “good guys with guns” defend themselves, their families or our society. Instead, they are aiding and abetting criminals by providing them with more guns, with 200,000 already stolen on an annual basis. And more guns means more homicides. More suicides. More dead men, women and children. Not fewer.
In the latest mass shooting in Oregon, of course, the “good guy with a gun” hypothesis fell on its face. Just as the potential “good guy with a gun” in the Gaby Giffords shooting came very close to firing on the wrong man and thankfully kept his weapon in check, an armed veteran in Oregon also wisely chose not to fire his gun lest he cause greater danger to himself and others.
There is no reason to believe that guns serve much if any social benefit beyond a few news stories now and again that are massively promoted by the gun lobby to further entrench the myth of effective self-defense.
Comedian Jim Jefferies also exploded the “self-defense” myth in a blisteringly funny and effective 3-minute bit:
But sadly, the same false arguments will continue to be used by gun proponents, in the same way that false arguments about climate change, taxes and abortion are consistently used no matter how often they’re debunked. The American right has gone so far off the rails that reality is no longer a relevant boundary on discussion. As with supply-side economics, the benefits of gun culture are taken not on evidence but on almost cultic faith by the right wing and its adherents.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Wasington Monthly, October 4, 2015
“NRA Mad House Of Mirrors”: The Scandalous Dirty Laundry That Will Not Get Hung Out To Air
We live in a post 9/11 society that has harnessed an ability to employ every technological means along with unleashing legal restraints to fortify unparalleled security measures in our war for safety. Several wars and presidents later, and now with a new incursion into Syria, the cost and sacrifice for our security continues to spiral. Paranoia runs high. Police are militarized. Citizens are militarized strolling streets and store aisles “jewelried” by firearms strapped to their bodies as if in some futuristic apocalyptic movie. And then, despite all of this heightened security, some guy in daylight freely hops over the spiked White House iron gates, jogs across the lawn and enters the White House through an unlocked front door where he is finally tackled and apprehended. This is an unprecedented and historical event that has been made by the lowest form of the biggest security breach at the highest asset of our society. It is incredible and incredulous.
The media machine is chomping down on this as a secret service institutional dysfunction. There will be Congressional investigations, soul-searching, protocol reforms, sound bites, and political grandstanding, but the other equally scandalous dirty laundry part of this story will not get hung out to air. The NRA will see to it. Why was the obviously mentally unhinged perpetrator, a known-known to law enforcement, Omar J. Gonzales, 42, a two tour Iraq war veteran able to own a personal firearms arsenal, some of which he had loaded in his car parked near the White House. Luckily, he was not intent on using it on that day in that moment in that setting.
Our society is very sick but not yet sick enough of guns. Sick with a warped second amendment epidemic guided by the likes of the National Rifle Association under the leadership of Wayne Lepierre and Ted Nugent who want to hand out guns to everyone, even and especially to kids as if it was candy. This is like the old mantra of McDonald’s, “get a kid early and you have them for life.” Whereas it would be unfair to blame our gun sickness entirely on the NRA, it is this organization that stands front and center with the money, tactics, power, politicians in their pocket, and symbolism that could immediately change the destructive trajectory that our gun culture costs to human life, to our way of life, and to our desire to walk free and brave in our own play areas free from senseless slaughter. Recent F.B.I. reports confirm what many believe, there is a clear and significant rise in mass shootings in America. This despite every slickly packaged argument for more gun amusement the NRA makes behind their house of reality distorting mirrors in defense of and advocacy of more guns for everyone. America has a greater daily security threat from folks with guns than deranged terrorists abroad. In the convoluted world of NRA mirrors the lies and deception cloud over the ugly truth that our gun culture fosters the economic health of the “mourning-grieving industry.”
But rather than be a reasonable broker to balance rights with real safety, the NRA has been grossly negligent and hostile to even the slightest retreat from out of control gun promiscuity. After each high profile gun slaughter episode that causes a societal wink, nod, acknowledgement and obligatory notion that maybe now change can occur, the NRA goes into damage control mode by disappearing into silence, until the news cycle moves to the next big headline, then it emerges from their dark corridors of power and influence with some nutty pro gun candy coated taunt aimed to defuse reasonable dissent.
The latest episode that sparked this artist out of numbness and reached down into my second amendment mental abyss to pull me back into the light happened on August 25, 2014. A nine year old girl in Arizona lost control of her Uzi firearm and shot and killed her gun instructor, Charles Vacca, 39, at the Last Stop Shooting Range, also known as “Bullets and Burgers.” The little girl was learning to shoot an Uzi? When did this become part of the American gunscape? It truly was a “last stop” for the parties involved. How much more perverted can it get than changing behavior with a conditioned pairing of burgers, “kid candy,” with the danger of firing exotic, rare and powerful guns. Is this the McDonaldization of guns and is it really supposed to be amusement?
I am pleased that Mr. Vacca’s family is praying for her without contempt. But this little girl’s summer vacation became a needless life changing tragedy. Sadly and incredibly, she was of legal age in Arizona, set at eight to shoot this weapon. Mr. Vacca leaves behind a wife and four children. That makes five lives multiplied by two entire social circles devastated by this tragedy. For what? Ultimately this was ruled an”industrial accident.” Incredible! And the NRA after-the-dust-settled response, “kids just wanna have fun.” Incredulous!
There are thirty gun deaths a day in America. I ache when I consider how many lives have been lost and ruined over senseless perverted NRA interpretations to the right to keep and bear arms. I ache when I hear of little kids, mentally disturbed folks and veterans, and for each relative of perpetrators and victims that become part of the slaughter. I began to think about a mountain of shoes of the dead from gun violence and how that would compare to the scenes of shoes from victims of the Holocaust at the hands of Nazis. This reality motivated me to paint “NRA Mad House of Mirrors.” The only way out of this is to see through the NRA’s mirrors.
By: Allen Schmertzler, Political Artist Specializing in Figurative, Narrative and Caricatured Interpretations of Current Events; The Huffington Post Blog, September 26, 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
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